Ideally someone would create a boot stick to wipe them, install Linux and Chrome, and easily pass them off to schools.
Start a charity and you could even give people a tax credit for their old machine. I’m sure that $30 would get people to give up a lot of them.
I haven't been involved in a while, so I'm not sure what the process is for laptops, but I know they reuse those as well.
I love this kind of embedded, community driven pedagogy.
It was usable though, albeit very slow.
The really old stuff, if it still runs, that might be hell. You wouldn't want someone to do video-calls on it anyway.
I've been installing various distro flavours on old laptops for a long time, and the experience only gets better. Personally, I can't remember the last time I had to struggle with a driver. I think the Dell I've got is from 2008, running Mint without issue.
There are so many old/used computers out there that are capable of doing everything the average person needs, the people just don't know it. I had an acquaintance buy a $2500 computer to take some community college programming courses, because he thought you need a powerful computer to "run programs".
Meanwhile, I'm over here earning a living on a t450s I bought for $300.
The response I got just now was that most of their students have laptops, but often internet/Wi-Fi is an issue. I live in a very affluent city, so I suspect the situation is far more dire a few districts away.
Although actual internet service is only half the battle. Chromebooks (used by my kid's school and issued/recommended by many districts) just seem to suck at connectivity. Even with a symmetrical 1Gbps internet connection, it was a non-stop battle for the first 2-3 weeks of school. A few things I learned along the way:
- Chromebooks hate dual-band SSIDs. All of the kids were issued different Chromebook models, and this was a universal truth for all of them. Separate SSIDs for 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz is critical.
- Chromebooks hate mesh networks. May not be universally true, but is at least the case for the mesh network created using a standard ATT Fiber gateway and the Airtie extenders they sell[2]. No matter the disparity in signal strength, they'd do their damndest to try to connect to the AP they first connected to.
- Chromebooks hate "wide band" networks (i.e. 40Mhz 2.4Ghz networks and 80Ghz 5Ghz networks). Even in uncrowded airspace, they seem to have problems.
- Chromebooks seem to have decent plug-n-play support for USB ethernet adapters, but mediocre support for USB wifi adapters. Neither of which is found in the official documentation; the only way to have any confidence that a particular dongle/adapter will be supported is to cross-reference the chipset of the adapter with the net drivers in the source code[3].
- It's an oddly common issue for Chromebooks to have loose wifi antennas internally. Probably not in higher-end models, but definitely in the lower-end models issued by schools.
I finally got things working stably, but it was mind-boggling how fussy they are. And many of the issues (such as the first two) only became apparent during live video streams, so it was a constant battle of fiddling with stuff in the evenings and testing it via performance during classes the next day.
With the amount and type of troubleshooting required to get to that point, it's no wonder wifi issues are the prominent complaint.
[1] https://www.t-mobile.com/business/education/project-10-milli...
[2] https://www.att.com/buy/accessories/internet-equipment/att-s...
[3] https://github.com/neverware/kernel/tree/master/drivers/net