I am a big fan of usable old computers. After you read this, you will be too.
Currently I have an old Lenovo M57p ThinkCentre M series that was made around 2007 that still works fine and is running Ubuntu 20.04 (the latest version is currently 22.04, so this is very current). Not only that, but it runs well. It never crashes, and I can download new software on it and it runs without a problem.
Here are some the benefits of having such a computer:
- it can act as my backup computer if I have a problem with my main work one. I can read my email at Yahoo and Google. If I need to, I can use things like Google sheets to be productive. I can download software to do word processing on it too. I can attend online meetings. Most of my day to day work functions can be done if need be.
- it can act as a test computer. I was writing a document on how to use a feature in IBM cloud, but I needed to test it out with a computer other than my work machine (which has special privileges). This old machine was perfect for that.
- it can also act as a hobby computer. I like to do things with arduinos and Raspberry Pi computers and the Lenovo computer is great for that.
- it can help me keep up my Unix skills. While I can get some of that by using my Mac, if I had a Windows machine for work I would especially want to have this machine for staying skilled up.
- it can do batch processing for me. I wrote a Python program to run for days to scrape information from the Internet and I could just have this machine do that while I worked away. I didn’t need to do any fancy cloud programming to do this: I just ran the Python program and checked on it from time to time.
- It has lots of old ports, including VGA and serial ports. Will I ever need them? Maybe! It also has a CD-ROM drive in case I need that.
As for the version of Linux, I tend to stay with Ubuntu. There’s lots of great Linux distros out there, but I like this one. Plus most times when I come across online Linux documentation, I will find it has explicit references to Ubuntu.
Now you can buy an old machine like this online from Amazon or eBay, but if I can do this on a 15 year old computer, you likely can ask around and get one for free. A free computer that can do all this? The only thing that should be stopping you is how to get started. For that, you will need these Ubuntu install instructions and a USB drive.
Good luck!
P.S. The software neofetch gave the output above. To install it, read this: How do I check my PC specs on Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS?
Smart People I Know 