cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/53870509

I am fucking 🤏 this close to starting a business where I just slam LMDE on poor people's laptops and put on LXQT and call it a day.

The only problem is that if someone can't afford a new laptop, they can hardly afford to pay me.

Also, I'm only good enough to just shove linux on a shitty computer, not be a 24/7 linux customiser. Also, getting paid to install linux on people's computers seems like it violates... something.

You wish.

In 2015 it would've shipped with a functional operating system.

Also, getting paid to install linux on people's computers seems like it violates... something.

Nah, even the GNU people themselves explicitly encourage that.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

Sadly I fear worse, the bulk of people will adapt in the stupidest way...

What's coming... is obvious. When the AI bubble bursts, there will be an absurd amount more data centers than use for them... and all the hardware is in forms that aren't going to be convertable into consumer devices.

What's going to happen is what microsoft, amazon, and google have been dreaming of for a decade... Remember google Stadia, Luna etc...

People won't be buying PCs... they will be buying, thin clients. Your PC will just stream your hardware from a data center. The music and movie industries will be happy because the providers can scan for pirated content... governments may flat out ban individuals from owning personal computers, that's a security risk they can't control, they are already looking into bills to prevent personal AI systems. No worries of people bypassing age verification, or running custom OS's or firmware that can't be controlled.

Best of all it's super profitable, instead of a few grand for a one time purchase, they can hit you up every month... and gradually raise the prices like cable, like movie streaming. Maybe even vendor lockouts... you gotta stream an MS computer to get access to office 365, but you'll also need an amazon subscription to run some other applications, or games or whatever they locked in exclusivity for.

yup. 8.1 first half the year... then it's been all downhill since july 29, 2015.

this is all based on the premise that an individual can afford the plethora of products and services on offer.

i think more or less that’s it’s difficult to foresee what will happen in the next 5
years.

what i believe people have a hard time understanding is that there is no such thing as “too large to fail”. it only takes a handful of poor decisions for a company to fail, and many more better decisions for it to succeed.

awesome.

Do you also have a solution for the other problem?

The only problem is that if someone can’t afford a new laptop, they can hardly afford to pay me.

yea, lower your rates to something a bit less than the retail price of a new laptop.

Sure, but what's the price? Too low and it's not worth the bother, too high and the person that's trying to get a little extra mileage can't afford it. I don't know when I can run classes since I'm taking care of my kid or looking for work and battling mental health stuff.

Also, I'm hardly Mr Torvalds, I can barely get my machine to work properly.

You'd be getting paid for the service, not for the software, so it's fine

Pretty sure the entry level machines has 4GB back then

At that point you connect your phone to a screen and use that to handle what is needed for paying bills and schoolwork instead of yet another subscription. It's after the AI bubble pops, so Greatest Depression time and nobody got spare cash for more services.

Saw this coming when Microsoft admitted to have bought up loads of hardware they couldn't actually use yet. I'm convinced the data centre build out is to hoard all the computing capacity so we are forced to use their cloud services because our own hardware isn't capable.

If this keeps up in a couple generations every personal computing device will essentially be a thin client with everything running remotely for a subscription.

Also, I’m hardly Mr Torvalds, I can barely get my machine to work properly.

Don't be too hard on yourself. Now that Torvalds has opened the gate to AI slop in Linux, he doesn't know how to get it working properly either.

Silver lining? Just maybe software vendors might be a little more careful with memory usage.

I won't hold my breath though.

That sounds disgusting. I'm willing to fall back to like DDR2 and my Core 2 Duo again, if it means maintaining my digital sovereignty.

what i believe people have a hard time understanding is that there is no such thing as “too large to fail”.

Well, I don't think people generally think that literally anymore. Nowadays what it ends up meaning is that if the company is such a monolith central to modern life, it can make the stupidest decisions imaginable and simply be "propped up" by sucking money out of our pockets.

Less "They're too big to fail" and more "They won't let it fail, even if it should."

I've had the same thoughts as you a lot of the time! Very similar. I've been wanting to run install clinics at my local library but...I only work there part time sooo...they won't let me since it's far outside my job description.

But as an outsider, you could look into hitting up your local library to run the occasional event. :D

My Latitude from like 2019 with 32GB of DDR4 sure is feeling fancy these days.

this is also very true.

i do believe that the pendulum swings back and forth but at the moment it’s swinging in the direction of people who are inherently selfish (amongst many other things)

Do it in batches. You are charging for your time basically. So don't do them one at a time. Get a few USB installers, wait til you've got 5 or so ready to go, and then just do them all at once. Now you can charge less. I mean idk how much your thinking of charging but installing an OS isn't exactly difficult. Takes maybe 15 minutes.

That's always been the end goal. They have the capacity and the money for that now

What you describe needs continued investment into datacenters, which will be a no go when the bubble pops. The hardware doesn't last forever (avg. life expectancy is somewhere around 6 years iirc), and running that hardware also isn't free at all.

Add to that that you can nowadays run Cyberpunk 2077 on medium detail with 60 FPS on a freaking Android Phone with FEX and Proton, and personal computing is far from dead, regardless of what they want.

Edit: I'd rather expect mainboards that make HBM available for consumer PCs to pop up, and that hardware for personal inference drops in price dramatically.

Nah, everything's gonna be a web app

Wait no, everything's already a fucking web app

Nothing quite like offloading all the heavy lifting to massive data centers in the cloud, only to bottleneck your $2,000 laptop because a todo-list app needed its own dedicated copy of Chrome just to render three lines of text.

I bought my 64GB laptop upgrade at the right moment

Getting paid for the software is fine. It's Free as well as free

Except stuff do get more powerful over time, even a mobile phone is quite capable today, no need for a thin client there.

Fuck those hoarders though.

When europe have succeeded to decouple from us tech, maybe they can fail all by themselves over there 😤

I quite like web also in my browser.

I despise electron "apps".

Fuck their subscriptions. I'll game locally on the thin clients if I have to. 2034, 512MB of RAM? It will fucking run Doom! Fuck it I remember running a Minecraft server with 768MB of system memory back in 2011. It worked for over 10 people.

Its going to be odd having really powerful CPUs and being limited by memory, what that leaves us able to run or not and how well it will run. Discord should be sweating, return to IRC!

This is a calculation that anyone should do before starting a business: is it profitable?

If you're genuinely serious about doing this, work out exactly what you're offering and how long it will take you to do this for each system. Then work out what you need per hour to live, and work it through. You should now have a ballpark figure for a single customer/system. You might need to tweak it a bit to allow for bits and bobs. Practice it a couple of times on any different systems you can get your hands on. Be ready for hardware challenges like different GPUs or other hardware.

You may need to figure out ways of making things quicker/cheaper, by doing some jobs in parallel and automating some stuff with scripts. You may end up with, say, multiple flash drives with Ventoy containing a few images and some scripts.

Be absolutely clear about what you're offering. It's important for potential customers to know that Linux isn't a Windows clone and it's not trying to be, and it may take a little time to adjust, but also not too strong on that as to put them off.

Like you already identified, you don't want to be a 24hr support line afterwards. You may need to invest in some reference material to get them started, in the form of a quick reference booklet or some Peertube videos, or even just a collection of links to a hand-selected group of videos or sites that others have done.

You may want to add extras, like data migration, but be careful not to have so many options as to confuse, and don't offer it so cheap as to screw yourself. The data migration side is a minefield because of things like save games, settings and all sorts of obscure applications that can hide their stuff in nooks and crannies. Again, be clear that it's only their docs and not all the other stuff. Also be clear that if they don't opt for data migration their stuff will be gone: it seems obvious but not everyone understands that. Factor these things into your prices: when you're advising people about the service you're not getting systems done.

Support could be an extra, but again be careful of pricing: this is an area you could bankrupt yourself if you get your pricing wrong.

I don't mean any of this to put you off at all. Running a business can be very rewarding and fulfilling, and could turn out to be the most awesome thing you've ever done. Depending on your commitments, you could try doing it as a side hustle to test out the market and refine your processes before diving in.

And, most of all, good luck!

Worked in a PC repair shop years ago, £50 to reinstall windows was a price people would pay fairly happily.

If you get customers happy to wait for bulk work you could probably do better. Plus doing it at home means no workshop to pay rent on. If its something on the side of your main job, even better.

Good! We do not need most of the volume of code that we ship nowadays anyway. Need to get out of the user’s way so they can do whatever they’re here to do, not give them a Hoover dam of bullshit

Same. My 2019 thinkpad is holding up surprisingly well, especially since I'm not running the bloated vibe slop mess that is Win 11.

You perform work, and provide expertise. That is basically the description of a job.

Soon, apps will be an emulated electron frame within your browser, so you can have chrome in chrome while both race to eat all your RAM

Still better than 11, though it's one of those "the bar is underground" situations

Welcome to the Brazilian personal computer experience. Enjoy!

I have an absolute junk piece of shit hp laptop is had to buy in a hurry in uni because my desktop shat the bead. Did badly on w10 and worse on w11. Stuck linux on it and now it runs quietly and like a dream.

Honestly if an electron app is done well it's fine to me. Issue is that electron is most used as a crutch for a dogshit project

Jokes on them, I have converted my entire workflow to be as simple as possible and I like playing retro games. I am good with using old "outdated" hardware.

Hell my laptop is 10+ years old now.

Let's see the positive part of it! Now programmers will have to learn how to actually optimise their programs and NOT to use Electron, Tauri and any other hybrid framework ever again!! /s

Looks around Oh fu- Everyones just vibecoding their shit

this is all based on the premise that an individual can afford the plethora of products and services on offer.

That's the neat part, your access can be dialed down. Oh you can't afford the normal plan... what about buying in 5 minute increments, what about with ads? They will be able to match you for what you deserve with your current earnings.

I got a 32 gig (soldered) thinkpad in Mar 2025 for $1350 delivered. There was a glorious period of $80/tb nvme and $50/stick 16 gig dimms. I was fortunate enough to build some pretty beefy machines with microcenter and marketplace deals.

Charge less than the price of a new laptop? 🤷

Meanwhile at the Microsoft Store

They can make more money selling fewer items for higher prices. As long as there are people who can buym the prices will go up. Even the Chinese chip contenders are selling under performing products for the same or higher prices than the established ones.

I need to be honest here. I bought my current "gaming" laptop in 2020 because my PC got struck by lightning right at the height of the last GPU crisis and I needed something. It came with 8gb of RAM, upgradable to 32 gb. I have never needed more. That system runs Cyberpunk at 100 steady fps, and I have no desire to play anything more graphically intense than that.

That being said, I wanted to upgrade last year because it was possible. I looked up the price for SO-DIMM RAM right after it skyrocketed and said "nope, I'm good".

my main computer has 48GB of RAM.

And I don't even game.