Jason Evangelho (00:00.078)
Coming up on this episode of Linux for Everyone, I'm jumping head first down the NAS rabbit hole and I'll be documenting my journey so that other people interested can learn from my experience and my mistakes. Plus an uplifting conversation with Mike Kelly, someone who has been using Linux to make a positive impact on hundreds of people's lives in his community. This is Linux for Everyone, episode 60 for December 22nd, 2025, and it starts right now.

Hi, this is Gerrit and I'm listening to Linux for everyone in Düsseldorf, Germany. Welcome home!

Jason Evangelho (01:15.182)
Hey everybody and welcome back to Linux for everyone. I hope you're all doing awesome. And if you're not doing awesome, I hope that you'll, you'll at least be feeling a little bit better at the end of this episode, because I have to tell you when I first heard Mike Kelly's story, I was, I was ridiculously inspired by him and motivated by him. And I wanted to tell his story, his story, his Linux origin story and how it led to the creation of something.

called the Computer Upcycle Project. I think it's going to inspire you too. And I'm going to tell you how to get in touch with him directly and to stay updated with what he's doing so that maybe you can also contribute and make a difference. What he's doing and how he's doing it is the very thing that I love so much about the Linux community. just these conversations are so much fun. Anyway, okay.

I'll save my gushing for the actual conversation in a few minutes. In the meantime, let me get some housekeeping done so I can kind of get you guys up to speed on what's been happening. There's a lot that's been happening on the Linux for Everyone front. Number one, Linuxforeveryone.net is live. It is self-hosted, it's on Ghost, and I'm pretty proud of it. There's a little bit of weirdness still and some tweaking that I need to do, but it is going to be kind of the hub for...

articles that I'm writing for links to videos that are going live on the YouTube channel and soon on the PeerTube channel, as well as this podcast. There's also a small selection of merch over at L4E.store. That's L, the number four E, dot store. And anything you purchase there helps out quite a bit. So go check that out. And if you have anything

to say, feedback or suggestions or just comments of any kind, the email address is letters at Linux for everyone dot net. That's letters at Linux for everyone dot net. Consider yourself warned. This begins as a horror story. Thankfully, it's not my own story, but it is absolutely a cautionary tale. It's yet another entry in a long running list of unfortunate souls who've lost years.

Jason Evangelho (03:37.856)
sometimes decades of precious memories to the corporate overlords that the majority of us trust with our invaluable data. That includes me. This story just happened to be the one that finally scared me into taking action and beginning the process of building my own NAS. There is a gentleman named Dr. Paris Butfield Addison. He's a game developer. He's a computer scientist. He co-founded a

Secret Lab, the studio behind the award-winning 2017 game Night in the Woods. Notably, he's been a loyal Apple customer for 30 years, and he's professionally published more than 20 technical books, many of them focused on Apple's own programming languages. He also helps run Devworld, one of Australia's longest-running non-official Apple Developer Conferences. Recently, just a couple weeks ago,

He tried to redeem a gift card, which he purchased from a brick and mortar retailer. And he tried to redeem that to pay for his annual six terabyte iCloud storage plan, which I looked up and believe here in the US it costs $30 a month. The code got flagged, the code on the gift card got flagged as invalid. And very quickly after that, his Apple account was not merely locked, but closed without any warning.

His entire digital life became inaccessible. He couldn't access years of saved photos and videos. He couldn't use any of the software that he paid for on any of the Apple hardware that he paid for. Everything he used for his professional and personal computing life locked up tight behind the same walled garden that users of the 2.3 billion active Apple devices worldwide are using.

Even more baffling and I'm sure frustrating, he still hasn't been given a solid reason why his account was closed and repeated attempts to contact Apple customer support have allegedly led nowhere, except for being told that he could plead his case at a physical Apple Store location. Sadly, his situation isn't isolated. There's similar horror stories that exist across all the different cloud ecosystems, Google Drive, OneDrive, and of course,

Jason Evangelho (06:01.76)
local operating systems like Windows. Do you remember back in five or six years, seven years ago, maybe, the infamous version 1809 update for Windows 10? It caused the unrecoverable deletion of some users' documents and pictures folder. It wasn't user error. Microsoft even admitted it. Now, I'm terrified of becoming

the protagonist in one of these stories. So I decided to take back control of my digital life beginning right now. Walled gardens, like Apple's, are really easy to enter and increasingly difficult to exit. And although I made the switch to Linux as my primary OS in 2018, I've also been partially stuck in Apple's ecosystem since buying the first generation iPhone back in 2007. And like many other people,

I have a copious amount of photos and videos sitting on Apple servers and that's making me increasingly uneasy. A few years ago, I canceled my Spotify subscription as well as streaming services like Netflix in favor of a Plex Media server. I made that decision after realizing I had given Spotify more than $1,300 since 2008 and I owned exactly none.

of the music that I was paying to listen to. And even after a lot of Blu-ray purchases, an unhealthy amount of money spent on vinyl records, and weeks spent ripping my CD collection, I haven't regretted that choice for a second. I mean, I have my own Spotify now, my own Netflix. So why does it make sense to pay rent on my own photo and video library, you know? Especially with the knowledge, with the fear that it can be

all deleted in the blink of an eye and I am powerless to stop it. So yeah, I'm embarking on a journey to build or buy, I think I'm leaning toward build for now, a NAS, a network attached storage device for everything in my digital life, both professional and personal. It's gonna be a box for, it might be two different boxes, for backups.

Jason Evangelho (08:25.624)
for to be my personal cloud server, for all my memories, for hosting virtual machines, for archiving PC games, for storing Linux for everyone footage and content, which I'm sure will be especially useful when looking at something like doing PeerTube. And I'm sure there are a ton more awesome uses for that, you know? Now, I'm not a sys admin. I know absolutely nothing.

about, well, I can build a PC, but I know nothing about building, setting up, maintaining a NAS. I only know that I want to take back control. And since I have this platform, why not document this journey in a way that benefits others too, you know? Ultimately, I want you to see the questions that I have as a complete beginner. I want you to see the hurdles or the gotchas that I come up against and

I'd love it if once this is all finalized and humming along nicely, maybe some of you are inspired to follow in my footsteps. Right now, the questions seem endless to me. And the more I research, the more questions I have. You know, like, like what is the minimum spec that I'll need for a mixture of, of storage and self-hosting applications? What would be overkill? How fast should my network connection be? See, really basic stuff. How much storage do I need?

Should I choose enterprise level hard drives or basic desktop hard drives? I'm pretty sure that probably enterprise level is the right call. Will a combination of traditional spinning rust hard drives and SSDs work? Can I easily just pop a new hard drive in there and not have much hassle in expanding my storage? Should I deploy like a physical offsite backup? And how do I do that? What's the best NAS operating system?

Can I just use my favorite Linux distro with something like Docker or Cloud Run? Is getting this all configured for remote access going to be a nightmare? Can I use my NAS for video editing or my home lab server? There's so much. So yeah, down the rabbit hole we go. Stay tuned for updates here and at LinuxForEveryone.net. And over the next few weeks, I'll be speaking to Joe Resington.

Jason Evangelho (10:48.454)
of Late Night Linux and Veronica explains and both of them will be I'm sure sharing years and years worth of knowledge with me and by extension sharing that knowledge with you. I'm very excited to have those conversations. And yeah, I think this is going to be a very fun albeit initially expensive adventure, but it's going to be worth it. Again, if you have any feedback at all, letters at Linux for everyone dotnet. And with that, let's jump into my conversation with Mike Kelly.

about the Computer Upcycle Project. Welcome to Linux for Everyone. Mr. Mike Kelly, Mr. Code Monkey Mike. It's awesome to have you here because not only is what you're doing really inspiring to me, but I'm just, ridiculously excited about telling other people about it and watching it grow and watching it make an impact on people's

lives. You're part of my Linux origin story of like watching like content. know Linux for everyone is kind of like what I am doing right now. So it's like it couldn't be a more fitting place for me to do kind of my first interview as an official nonprofit which we got approved yesterday.

Dude, congratulations. Seriously, congratulations on that. If you don't mind, can you give us a brief rundown of your full Linux origin story? What inspired you to get into Linux, or what was the gateway to get you interested in all this stuff?

You know, this is so fun, Jason, because my Linux origin story actually kind of co-mingles and becomes the genesis of the Computer Upcycle project and this whole thing too. So it's, I see how much gray you have in your beard. So I think we're of the same vintage. I was born in 81. So like, I know you're a little older, but anyway, I grew up with kind of, you know, the computers tinkering around, you know, like my first computer in my house was 88, 89.

Mike Kelly (12:51.202)
Like you turned it on and it was just C colon slash DOS. Yep. So it makes, it makes me laugh. All these people that are terrified of the terminal. like, yo, when I was a kid, like that's all we had.

As I've seen kids using computers over the last four or five years, they're fearless. They don't have any problems like learning, how do I, I want to do this, how do I do this? If it involves this terminal command thing, sure, I'll learn that, not a problem. They're not scared of that.

My first programs, and I'm putting in quotes, were like bat scripts so I can get into my games faster. You know, Space Quest, Commander Keen, like all these games. so anyway, I was just like, but I always loved tinkering around with the computer. like, but it was MS-DOS and then of course Microsoft Windows 95, 98, you know, XP, know, Microsoft train all the way. And then even after college, my first job, I was like an outsourced tech guy.

You know, like that would went into, know, these companies that like, were not big enough to have their own IT departments, but they still needed like a computer person to come in. like kick the printer and, know, delete viruses from Bob's computer. It was the tech guy. So it always kind of tinkered around. I think my first bump in with Linux was Ubuntu. I remember you could mail away for the CD. Like, you know what I'm talking about?

I do, I mean, I never did that personally because my, you know, my origin stories started much later, but I remember seeing them. I remember seeing them on newsstands and kind of being really fascinated by it.

Mike Kelly (14:21.974)
I love the live CD aspect of it. And I would kind of keep it in my backpack as a live environment CD to kind of fix windows problems. And I clicked around and I, I love the idea of Linux, right? It was so, I'm like, wow, I can't believe this is like a free open source thing that like people make and it's free, you know, like that's amazing coming from the Microsoft world. Like it's, someone just gives you this. However,

Right, right.

Mike Kelly (14:49.07)
It still was so far from daily drivable for me. It wasn't even funny. It was just a tool that I used here and there. And I the first win I had with it, and I think it was around like 2008 or nine. Um, actually it was right before the big, uh, housing crisis happened in, in America. So there was mortgage companies popping up all over the place and they were totally sketchy boiler room.

I was their IT person, you know, for these things. And they would just pop up in an office and like, all of a sudden they had like 40 workstations in this like one room office, just cranking out mortgages, just trying to tank the economy. And they did it. What we ran into with these kind of like fly by night mortgage companies is they always wanted to share a document drive, you know, and map it as like your Z drive. In Windows, you're only allowed to share a folder with

10 other machines before they make you upgrade to a Windows server. And like they would groan because they're like, I don't want a Windows server. Like that's whole expense and a headache. And like, we're not trying to run a domain. And, but that was Microsoft's way of saying, Hey, listen, you clearly are in an office environment and we would like you to spend a lot more money where it's like, okay, well Bob will share his folder with these 10 people. And then this person will share it with these other people.

And so I was like, you know what? I think there's this thing in Linux Samba server. And so I got my Brown Ubuntu CD, took one of the old Dell towers that they had and I installed it, installed Ubuntu on there, enabled Samba sharing and put the shared folder on there. And you know, Linux doesn't care how many people you share the folder with. so everyone was just like, it was galaxy brain. You know what I mean? Then the whole company, they're like, wait, what? And so like for a while there,

I was literally building these file servers and deploying them to like offices and they were all just Ubuntu boxes with Samba. Right? Yeah. I didn't have to like compile any drivers or do anything wacky. was just, it was so easy. It was, it was really kind of funny. So that was my first kind of like win with Linux where I'm like, Oh wow, this is nice. But I still never used it. Like on the desktop for myself. I was never a Linux user.

Jason Evangelho (16:51.34)
and all out of the box,

Jason Evangelho (17:04.577)
Very cool.

Mike Kelly (17:11.724)
And then right around when Mac switched to Intel, I fell into the Apple world hard. had the iPhone, had the MacBook Pros, I had the Mac Minis, I had everything. You couldn't tell me anything different.

Why? Why was it? mean, and I'm not being like combative or anything because I was also a very heavy Mac OS user. So I'm just genuinely curious like what was so compelling about it that you just weren't interested in opening your brain to anything else.

At that job that I talking about where I was an outsourced tech person, I got a G4 Quicksilver tower, you know, back in the day. I remember those. Yeah. So sexy. mean, it was in the windows world. Like all we were dealing with was like beige and black towers that were just ugly. And then here comes this like shining glimmering. And I just loved it. I bought it from someone for 20 bucks because it wouldn't boot up and I fixed it.

And then I had my first Mac and I was just in love, you know, I was just in love. And for me, it was more, it was Unix like enough where I was like, I like this. And it was an exit from Microsoft. I really was kind of sick of windows. Linux was still a pipe dream. and so Mac was it for me and, I became a web developer, you know, and so I've been building websites and doing code for a while. And, and in that time, like app, you know, Mac and, and web development really paired.

well together. So I just had my system set and I was just, I was good. But around like 2019, 2020, I started kind of falling out of love with, with Apple. You know what I mean? They had the laptops with the crappy keyboards. yeah.

Jason Evangelho (18:46.926)
I had one of those for work and my gosh

Terrible. so the love started fading and then like the touch bar with no use. And then they took the mag safe chargers from me and, yeah, it's just like all these things kind of added up. And then like the big sir update came out and totally broke my dev environment. and they just didn't care. You know I mean? It was just, it was in that moment. I realized as long as your needs aligned with Apple's needs, you'll be okay.

But the second those two things diverge, you're screwed because there's no other option. Even if you could replace the operating system, you're tied into all the software. Like I couldn't give up iMessage. I couldn't give up, you know, there was all these like walled gardens that they had to be stuck in. So around this time is 2020. Everyone was in lockdown. Nobody knew what the hell was going on and we were all stuck at home and bored. It was around this time my parents' laptop died and they just went and bought a new one.

My brother actually worked for Microsoft at the time, which is pretty funny. And so my brother always gives them new laptops from Microsoft and they were fine. So anyway, so they had this old Lenovo yoga with one of those stupid hybrid hard drives that failed miserably. Yeah. So it broke, it broke on them, of course, you know, the hard drive went bad and they said, Hey Mike, do you want this? And I said, yeah, sure. You know, I'm bored as hell. And so I get it. I figure out, it's the hard drive.

easy to replace, grab a crucial SSD, throw it in there. I know, I know, know. Pour one out, pour one out. So anyway, I threw an SSD in, physically it's fixed, right? But what am I going to do? Am I going to put windows back on this thing? I didn't want to, right? I was like, you know what? This is a good opportunity for me to play around because it's the pandemic. I got this extra laptop. So it had been so many years since I played with Linux. I was blown away by how far it had come.

Jason Evangelho (20:17.792)
Rest in peace, Chris.

Jason Evangelho (20:42.572)
What did you install?

Jason, what did I not install?

you were tinkering. Like, do you also love just installing Linux? Yeah. Not even necessarily, just going through the installation process. I have a, I don't know, it's kind of warped maybe. Other people are like, you love just installing Linux? Yeah, I enjoy the hell out of that process.

joked around the people that I wish my job could be installing Linux on things. And actually it might someday. We'll get to how that might happen. Anyway, I distro hopped my face off. mean, Linux Mint, Pop OS, elementary, Fedora, I mean, you name it. I did all of them. There was one point I remember I had like five USB drives. I was rotating them and I was like downloading distros like crazy.

I remember my wife coming into my home office and being like, what are you doing? It was like the middle of the night. And, she thought I was like up to no good in there. I just have like all these, I like all these USB drives in my hand and I'm like, I just, I'm, I just got to download one more. so, but it was fun. was having fun. You know how this every person gets in the Linux, they go through distro hot land and they have a good time.

Jason Evangelho (21:59.128)
Hopefully.

Hopefully, yeah. I it's a mixed bag, right? But that's part of the enjoyment, right?

I I think I understand the really dramatic improvement that you saw after like five or six years. Yeah. Because we know, I mean, we can see it in just the last three years.

Well, I was just going to say from that point, from that point to today is shocking how far it's come.

Have you seen the Fedora 43 installer, the new Anaconda installer?

Jason Evangelho (22:32.152)
think it's still called Anaconda. It got a, it got a overhaul. It's really slick. It's just finally, like finally they made it intuitive and actually attractive and they've got this cool little QR code at the end, like tell us about your experience installing Fedora. And it's just very modern. Anyway. Yeah.

So long story short, hopped around on this laptop, played around with Linux. I ended up just settling on like Linux Mint because everything just kind of worked and it was, you know, a nice clean UI, light enough. And so it took, it's funny, it was like pulling nails to get set up on Mac, but it took like five minutes to get my dev stuff set up on Linux because I'm like, well yeah, it's PHP, Apache, Nginx, you know, like it's, these are all just like table stake stuff for Linux.

And it essentially, now I'm not a programmer, not a developer really. Did it essentially, like the muscle memory? Was that kind of the same? I mean, as far as the command stack and the, you didn't have to completely relearn everything.

No, no. And in fact, you know, you it was just a lot easier. And in fact, it simplified things a bit because like, my SAS company, member vault is runs on the cloud and they're just Ubuntu servers. So when I SSH into the cloud to work on, you know, things, in a Linux environment, right. It was actually a lot easier for my brain to be like, wait, why don't I. I have the same environment locally now than I do on the server. And how cool is that?

So anyway, I was able to get my development stuff up and I thought, man, this is really good. And it was so good. In fact, I mean that, that laptop was a bit of a dog, but again, it was proof of concept that I could actually use Linux and get work done. during this digital hopping time, this is how you kind of come into it, right? I start really getting into Linux and I want to like learn all about it I want to hear about it. like I'm following YouTube channels like yours. I'm listening to Linux unplugged, like the podcast.

Mike Kelly (24:37.076)
And just hearing you all talk about using Linux on a day to day basis normalized it for me. I didn't think anybody actually used it day to day. thought, okay, we use it in the cloud.

Yeah, I'm just using it as my browser. I'm using it to, yeah, sure, sure. I like to use the word normalized. Yeah.

It did it really did normalize it because it was not like this is some weird free fringe Tinkery thing I play with this can actually be there are people daily driving this to get their work done and Living on it and I thought that's so cool Wouldn't that be awesome if I could get there someday and at that time system 76? also love them They released their lemur pro laptop and it's like we know their 14 inch

Yeah, super portable laptop. And I bought one. And that was my first purpose. Like built like Linux machines and get this, they don't care if you keep the same, distro on there. Like I was playing around with Arch and stuff like that. And I actually ended up like getting into conversations with system 76 support where they would like tell me, here's how you do this in this laptop in Arch. And like some of it was like, I felt bad. I'm like, listen, I know this isn't your job. You can tell me to go away. Cause that's the other fear.

about Linux is that like, okay, I'm going to put Linux on this Dell. And then if I ever have a problem, Dell is just going to blame it on Linux and, you know, exit off the stage.

Jason Evangelho (26:06.998)
You and I, people in the Linux community, people who, I should say people who have a community to fall back on and lean on when they're switching over to Linux for the first time, they're really lucky. But we cannot lose sight of the fact that there are tons of people who don't have a community to ask these questions to. You know, they just one day decide they need to switch or they want to switch.

And they can't just go ask all their followers on Mastodon or, something I hope that we never lose sight of is that we, when it comes to usability and things like that, we have to bear in mind that, you know, some people do live in a, I don't want, I don't want to call it a bubble, but you know what I mean.

I'm such an advocate about Linux, like some people would ask me like, oh hey, what laptop should I buy? And I joked around, I'm like, well, look for this or this. And I was like, and if you really are curious, like system 76. And I've had a couple people that are regular people, like not technical people at all, go and buy a system 76 laptop and had a great experience. But people need to know that there's a little bit of a safety blanket there. You're not just on your own.

Like, something's gonna break, I'm gonna have to recompile my kernel by myself, or, you know. That's what people think, man!

That's what scared me off, scared me away from Linux back when I was doing other podcasts and other projects and stuff. I kept seeing these mentions of recompiling the kernel and going into a command line to configure the driver for things and I'm like, no, that's not for

Mike Kelly (27:42.326)
I'm not gonna do that. Yeah.

If you're listening to this and you're Linux curious, you don't have to do that stuff anymore. That's something we need to normalize is, is PCs shipping with Linux.

But what happened to that yoga you might ask? Because I didn't need it.

What happened to that yoga?

I will tell you what happened to the yoga. That yoga started an entire thing. So I put Linux Mint on there, know, refreshed it all and everything. And I was like, I don't need this laptop and I don't need the money from trying to sell it. Right. I was like, I should just like there's Facebook free groups, know, buy nothing groups. And I was like, I'm just going to post it on there. It's not a great computer, but it's usable. Like it's somebody would love to use this thing. And,

Mike Kelly (28:30.486)
So I throw it on this Facebook free group and I say, Hey, free laptop. It's running Linux, it's not running windows, you know, but like, if you want to get online and like, I don't know, browse the web or do whatever, listen to Spotify, like that kind of stuff. Like it's perfect. I got, I didn't, thought somebody would take it, right? But I got hundreds and hundreds of replies being like, my God, please, what a gift. Thank you. Can I please have this? Remember this is during the pandemic and so there's

So many stories that people that have like either no laptop or computers in the house or the whole family is using one and like the parents are having to work from home. A lot of kids, not every kid gets a Chromebook, right? So like there's a huge need. I had no idea how big the digital divide is out there in the community.

This isn't, this is just in your city.

This is in Olympia, Washington. This is even Seattle. This is like, we're known for being in between Portland and Seattle. Like that's what we're known for.

Well, again, I think it comes back to, you know, the fact that people like us, admittedly, we, maybe we take for granted or we lose sight of the fact that not everybody has a whole bunch of computers just lying around to tinker around with.

Mike Kelly (29:48.694)
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And again, to realize that so many people are like trying to go back to school, do their job and everything from a phone is insane to me. And so anyway, so there was just this huge out crying of people that wanted this laptop. I wish I had more of them, you know, but I, yeah, I re-homed that one laptop and also selfishly I was like, I wanted to stay in touch with these people. Cause I'm like, let me know how you get along with Linux.

I was like, because I'm so impressed by how easy it is. And like at that moment I was like, I think normal people can use this. I think Linux is to the point where like, you don't have to be super nerd to use this. Here's what's interesting. After I rehomed that laptop, that post, a bunch of people messaged me on Facebook and were like, hey, Mike, I love that you just gave away this laptop. I have a couple laptops sitting in my closet in my garage or whatever.

I don't know what to do with them. It feels weird to throw them in the trash. I don't want to sell them either and deal with all that. Like, do you want them? And then you can, you know, fix them up and give it out to people. Like, you know, cause people saw the need and I was like, well, yeah, of course I would.

Were these just strangers reaching out to you about this? Yeah. OK. Yeah. OK.

Yeah, these are just people on a Facebook free group. I mean, we all share the fact that we live in Olympia, but they don't personally know me. And I thought, hey, all right, this will be a fun little whim, right? But every time I would post a computer, people would reach out and donate computers to me. So the cycle started where like I would donate the computer out and then a bunch of people would message me and pay it forward. And be hey, this is great.

Jason Evangelho (31:28.193)
forward.

Mike Kelly (31:31.658)
It didn't take long for me to be known in Olympia. was like, that's the computer guy. Like, and if somebody even asked about like, Hey, does anyone know where I can get like a cheap computer? Like 20 people would tag me. They're like, no, no, there's this guy. He just gives out computers and everyone's like, wait, what is this a scam? Like it was, it was really, really funny. And at some point during, you know, during the pandemic, again, this has been happening over years. I converted like half of my garage into a workstation.

because I was getting that many computers in.

Can you put a number on it?

Up now, now the estimation is over 1500 locally here in Olympia.

Yeah. So I mean, it's a lot of, a lot of computers. And again, these are all computers that were literally just wasting away. and then at some point, a couple of years ago, I ended up getting in touch with somebody. don't forget what the company is, but there's some global company and the head of IT lives here in Olympia. And so it's his job every year. The company will like ship him all these laptops and he has to zero out, you know, clear out the drives and get, and get rid of them. And.

Mike Kelly (32:41.95)
Somebody on my behalf reached out to him and said no no no you got to give it to this guy Mike He fixed them up and gives them out to people and so I got in touch with him And so now about every six months to a year whole drop me an email and say hey I got boxes and they'll be like 40 Dell latitudes per box

I'm sure they're perfectly usable still.

They're perfectly usable. Most of them are like, eight to 10th gen I sevens with 16 gigs of Ram, MDME drives. Like, mean, and you and I know.

I have a Dell Optiplex box sitting upstairs maybe like four, three years ago, cost me $120 and it doesn't have nearly those specs, but it's now my Plex server.

I mean, these things cook. And if you think about somebody that's literally going on, 99 % of people, in fact, I would pre-install three apps. I would pre-install Google Chrome. I would pre-install Zoom and LibreOffice. That's it.

Jason Evangelho (33:47.15)
Did that, was that difficult for you to install Google Chrome instead of Firefox? Why I can guess why you did there. Yeah, Because that's what people use.

I mean, firefighter- I know!

Mike Kelly (33:55.438)
That's what people use. You gotta pick, you gotta choose your battles, right? Like I don't wanna.

That's fair, yeah. At this point, is this still just a Mike Kelly project? Yeah. There's no website, there's no name for it, nothing. No.

And this is, so I've spoken at Planet Nix and Scale and Linux Fest Northwest because what happened is around, I guess, a year and a half, maybe almost two years ago now, I realized, and sometimes people would like get a laptop from me, use it, have no problems, great, but then they would like buy a new computer or their life situation changed, right? And instead of just like throwing that laptop away,

they would give it back to me and they're like, Hey, I use this for like a year or two. was great. Give it to somebody else. I'm like, Olympia is a place. like Olivia. Olympia is it's good. You know what? I'm going to, I'm going to make the argument that I think those people are everywhere. So, and so I would get these machines back and I realized something. I realized that nobody does updates. Even though Linux Mint has a little shield and it's like, Hey, click here to update me. People are like,

lot of really nice people in your community.

Jason Evangelho (35:08.844)
No, no, go away, It's not forcing them to do it and so-

They don't do it, right? They don't do it. And that's just, you know, little upgrades. God forbid the version upgrades where you have to go through a wizard. And so like, I'm like, this is not ideal. People love the, they love Cinnamon, right? It's a very Windows-esque experience. Everything makes sense. Everything is where you expect it to be. It's a boring interface, but like it's useful, right? Like it's very utilitarian.

I'm boring

Boring though, boring means familiar and familiarity is comfortable.

Absolutely. I don't daily drive Cinnamon, but I 100 % think that most people coming from Windows should. So that was interesting. And of course, around the same time, I am falling in love personally with NixOS. And my first talk I gave at any conference was Linux Fest Northwest, think 2023, on five reasons to love NixOS. Like I fell down the NixOS hole hard, and I still am. So I've been daily driving NixOS for...

Jason Evangelho (36:14.956)
We might need to talk about NixOS a little bit for people to, and I've never used it personally. I hear about it often. In my head, there's three different types of distributions, I guess. Or at least on the OS level, there are, you know, ones, the majority of them like Ubuntu, Zorin OS, whatever, Arch, you know. And those are completely unlocked.

Yeah. lack of a better word, they're unlocked. You can change the core system components. You can install whatever you want. can remove whatever you want. And there's immutable distros like SteamOS, like Vasite, where it's sort of locked down like how you install things and what you can install. Now, how does NixOS differ from those two styles?

So it's not just that, right? So your immutable distros like, yeah, or fedora silver blue, like all these immutable distros, or you don't even have to look that far. You can look at your phone. The reason that your phone never crashes, right? You never like do an update and your phone's unbootable, right? Because it swaps out the image. Like it's just like, right. And that's why your stupid iPhone update or whatever is huge. Five gigs, right? Cause you're just swapping out one whole system for another whole system, right? Right, right.

And it turns out that's a really safe way to do these types of things. And that's what steam OS does. That's what all these things do.

Now that happened to me recently with Bazite. You you've got the two images like the OS1, OS2 or OS3.1, OS3.2. And the first one just, it booted to a black screen after an update. It could have been an Nvidia related issue. And all I did was I just selected the second image and then made that the default solved.

Mike Kelly (38:01.72)
So here's the thing, that's a great way to put together a system, And what will happen is in those systems, your home directory is mutable, you can do whatever you want in your home directory, but the system directory, all the folders outside of there are locked, they're mounted as read-only. And that makes a very stable system. However, you know if you've used that kind of thing, well how are you supposed to install stuff then? Obviously if you install a flat pack on top of it, that's fine.

But like, what if you wanted to install some kind of system level thing? Well, then we get into these weird like, well, spool up another container. Like it's just containers all the way down and, or, or the OS, RPM OS tree thing where it's like you're branching it and, and there's like, layers, you know what I mean? Like transparency layers on top of it. And these are all, these all work, but I believe it's my opinion that those are all hacks. And so what Nick's, what Nick's OS lets you do.

Is NixOS is almost like, bear with me, it's almost like Arch Linux, right? Arch Linux, you don't look at Arch Linux as here's like an opinionated desktop. Well, it's here's a bin of Legos. You snap them together however you like, right? So imagine Arch and something immutable like Fedora Silverblue had a baby, right? What, what NixOS lets you do is NixOS lets you declare.

what is in that base image. So you are in charge of building that base image. So it's still immutable, but you get to choose what's in there. And when you update or rebuild your NixOS, you're basically just rebuilding your core system against that config file, but you declare it.

And that config file is, essentially your entire build, right? It seems like it would be advantageous to someone like me who's constantly hopping around from computer to computer, but once the same, know, I don't want to have to reinstall everything. I don't even really, I don't really even want to have to use a script to do it. I just want to install it and it's all there already. It's all just pre-configured and.

Mike Kelly (40:02.307)
You're gonna be

Mike Kelly (40:13.454)
So, yep, when I was doing the Arch thing, when I was arching that chapter of my Linux life, I remember I had a Git repo that had a bunch of shell scripts. So I would install bare Arch and then I would run the script and it would set everything up for me.

That's not a bad solution.

No, that's not a bad solution. But here's what's here's the problem. You run that script and then you realize like a month later like, I had to add I had to add these other things in there, right? You should go back and update that script. But do you?

No, no, you do not. course you don't. You just add it manually.

Automatically and then that one thing but then the next time you use that script you're like wait Where's my git cracking? You're like, right. I didn't put it in my script, right? Nick's OS makes you do that You have to put it in your config if you want it in your system Some people say it's a pain in the butt to have to do that But to me, I'm like you're forcing yourself to self-document it and so now ain't get like in my github I have my entire system set up complete with PHP complete with

Mike Kelly (41:19.754)
all my dev stuff complete with all the apps I want, right? And so I can trash pick a laptop, install NixOS on there, clone my repo, type NixOS rebuild, go get a coffee. And by the time I come back, my system's set up and ready to go because I too, I too have a problem with having too many computers. So here I am giving out Linux Mint computers to people because they're easy to use and you know, blah, blah.

But I am falling in love with NixOS. And then I'm seeing these shortcomings with Linux Mint, right? Like people don't do updates. And it also takes me a bit of time. I think the defaults on Linux Mint are a little goofy. So I'm doing a bit of customization to Mint when I do these things, right? And then of course there was the Mint update that in their software store, they filtered out unverified flat packs. I don't know if you've heard about this.

I haven't, actually. haven't... I was out of the daily news cycles for quite a while. like two or three years.

So Linux Mint pushed an update where you go to the software store and you type in something like, Zoom, right? You're like, I want to install Zoom. Well, Zoom, the Zoom Flatpak isn't owned by the Zoom Corporation or whatever. It's a community member who is repackaging it. There's a whole lot of that happening. But those are technically unverified Flatpaks. You know?

I see, and it says right there on FlatHub, the ownership of the Zoom app ID has not been verified and may be a community package. I mean, there's gotta be many major apps that are unverified.

Mike Kelly (42:59.958)
There's a time, there's a time. And I get why they did it, right? Because they're like, they're trying to add a little bit of safety blanket in there. But what happens is it brings us back to a point where people don't think that there's any software on Linux.

man.

So, for a, for a distribution like Linux min, who's supposed to be like the on-ramp for people to get into Linux when they install Linux mint and they type in zoom and they don't see it there. They think, okay, well, I guess this stuff doesn't work on.

Well have to go back to Windows or Mac OS now. that's not, that's not good.

At the same time, I'm in love with NixOS. And I thought, hmm, because it's so declarative, could I build a distro basically using NixOS? Because that's what NixOS lets you do essentially. With these declarative config files, you're essentially, everyone gets to have their own bespoke distro.

Jason Evangelho (43:56.608)
It's Mike's operating system. It's basically.

I it's NixOS, but it's a NixOS configuration, you know, loaded up in there. And so I thought, huh. And of course I had the perfect guinea pigs, because my kids are homeschooled and they all have homeschooled laptops, and like that I would have to like maintain. And so I started playing around with this idea of like, could I rebuild Linux Mint in NixOS and make it and build in a lot of these things that I like, like a lot of the defaults.

flat hub integration, and then can I also build in automatic updates that happen in the background? And because of how, again, I don't want to geek out too much about this, but like how NixOS works is that you can rebuild the system, right? Does it go NixOS rebuild? And you can say, I want to switch to that new rebuild right away, or you can say, I want to switch that on the next reboot.

right.

So, obviously if you're just adding something really quick and you just want to see it right away, you do switch. But if you're doing something big, like switching out the kernel or desktop environment, you want to pass in the boot flag. So you're like, you know, don't break my system. Right. So like when I reboot, I'll reboot into that new image that has all this stuff in it. And you can have these updates happen like Flat Hub, Flatpak updates can happen whenever they want.

Mike Kelly (45:25.146)
You know, they're easy, they're hot swappable, but like that happens like in the background. And then as far as the system updates, they happen automatically. And these are all just system D jobs that I scripted into the NixOS config. And so I have system D jobs every week will run a NixOS rebuild boot in the background. And I even give it like a low CPU and IO priority.

So like you can still use your. Yeah. you get a little notification saying, system updates are happening, but don't worry about it. Just keep doing your thing. And again, what's nice about NixOS is that like, let's say somebody pulls the power plug or like this gets disconnected from the internet or like their battery dies, right? Like, no, you were in the middle of a system update. It's fine because NixOS won't apply the update until it's compiled, checked and ready to go.

It's not intrusive at all. Yeah, yeah,

Mike Kelly (46:24.416)
Again, these are the safety precautions that we get with the mutable distros and NixOS has that too. So again, it's nice to have this kind of like built-in thing. So every week there's an update that runs in the background and after the update is done, I just get a little notification that says, hey, system updates are done. Reboot the computer whenever you get a chance. It doesn't matter. They can keep using it, it's fine. They're not in some weird broken state. And then when they reboot, they're in the new update. Now you might say, okay, great.

But what about the next major version? So NixOS has these things called channels. So in your config, you just say, Hey, I want Firefox. You don't say I want Firefox 85 or whatever. You know what mean? You're not declaring the version of the thing you want. You're just declaring what you want. So the version of what you get depends on what NixOS channel that you're tuned to. Right? So like

So, and they do the same, they do a similar release cycle than, than like Fedora and stuff do. So they do every six months, there's a new stable. So there's 25.05 and then this last week, 25.11 came out. Pretty self-explanatory. Right. So how you update your NixOS system is there is no like interface to be like, go through a wizard and stuff like that. It's a lot simpler than that.

Alright.

May and November, right?

Mike Kelly (47:48.364)
You'd say, all right, well, I'm tuned into the 25.05 channel, which tells me what version of system D, what version of this, right? But now I'm just going to switch my channel to 25.11 and then rebuild the system against the same config. It's the same config.

And what, and so the user has to, has to manually switch that channel or.

In a typical NixOS setup like me running NixOS, yes, I manually change my channel, do a rebuild, deal with any issues that might come up. Sometimes the language changes a little bit or an option changes.

But they're not getting the typical NixOS.

Certainly not. they're certainly not. Because again, what I'm doing with Nick's book is, can I make like a Chromebook like experience? I'm like, basically what I wanted to do was I wanted to combine Linux Mint with Chromebooks using Nick's OS. Like, could I combine all those things together and make something that like could just work for regular people? And I think I did it.

Mike Kelly (48:52.942)
when you switch the NixOS channel, like I can declare in the Nix config, I can declare what channel that we should be tuned to. So the cool thing is that I can in testing, switch to channel 25.11, do a rebuild, test everything out, make sure everything's good. My kids are testers and guinea pigs. They will run on testing branch for a while. And then all I have to do is push that config

to main and then every next book that's online within a week will download that new thing, rebuild against the new channel and then the next time they reboot they're on 25.11. And it's all been tested because I've tested it, know? Like so there's no, there's no, so people can jump major versions without even realizing it. They won't. They won't realize it. It's seamless. It's just like any other update.

And again, I haven't seen a distro be able to do this like NixOS because you're rebuilding against this config file. like, it doesn't matter what versions of stuff, it's all the same. It's cool.

I don't know if I wouldn't call it risk free operating system experience, it's significantly free of paper cuts and opportunities, free of opportunities for people to accidentally mess up.

They really can't break it. Now again, it's limiting in the fact Unbreakable.

Jason Evangelho (50:23.79)
It's on Mixbook OS, Unbreakable.

is unbreakable. mean, like, if obviously, like, there's limitations, right? So like, here's the trade-off is that there's guardrails. So like, people like me and you will be like, like, obviously, it's just NixOS in the end of the day. So you could add your own stuff in there and make Nix book your own thing, right? But like a standard user is like not going to be able to like, switch their version of systemd or the kernel or whatever, you know what mean? But that's fine.

But a standard user doesn't want to do it.

Well, exactly. it's not for the next book is not for Linux nerds. It's for the friends and families of Linux nerds who don't want to support them. Right. It's like, Hey, here's a computer that will just work. You just update, you just open it, use it, it'll update itself and re you know, reboot it every once like re I always tell people just reboot about once a month. Um, and it'll run forever. And that's true. That has been true so far.

What can they install on their, they can, they can use flat hub. Okay. So anything on flat hub. Yeah. Okay. Okay.

Mike Kelly (51:29.122)
And it can-

Mike Kelly (51:34.062)
And again, just a big shout out to like flat hub and like all that integration, right? Because like that has been key, right? And again, you think well, you know between flat hub and anything web-based Dude that covers Almost all of what you need My son is like nine now. He's getting into developing, you like writing game. He wants to write games so like he's he's got like G develop and like Godot and like he's like literally doing development stuff

And it's just flat packs. Like it's fine. He's on an X book. so it's like, can do quite a bit. Like if you want Spotify, go for it. Steam is a flat pack now. Right. So you could just install steam and go for it. there's all these things, but again, the machines that these are going on aren't like high-end gaming machines, like machines that these are going on aren't like hardcore development machines. it's

These are, in your estimation, mean, how old, so it's the end of 2025 as we're recording this, how old are, what's the median age of these computers?

I think, you know, I go by kind of like what stickers on there, right? And so at first, when I first did it,

Windows Vista. yeah. Probably.

Mike Kelly (52:46.08)
I've gotten some XP ones. It's actually kind of a fun, selfishly, it's kind of a fun, a fun tinker thing to do to get these people just donating all these machines. And you're like, I remember this computer. I remember this computer, right? So there's some classics that people have donated too. It is my dream to get like a box of ThinkPads though. That would be just be a chef's kiss. So anyway, so.

Okay,

Most of these laptops these days coming in are like kind of stickered like they're like Windows 8. And getting into Windows 10, when I first started this, the most common one I got was like a Windows 7, right? And Windows 7, like depending on the specs, will run just fine.

You're kind of looking at the minimum system requirements for Linux Mint. is that kind of a good baseline? Yeah.

So what I do is, and in fact, actually, we come in resource-wise, we come in lower than Linux Mint. I don't know why. Yeah, NixOS is pretty minimalistic by default. It's like Arch, right? Where it's like, we're not gonna assume we know what you want on your system. You tell us what you want. But I always do, like, for Nixbook, I have like the rule of fours. So I want four gigs, I wanna see four gigs of RAM, four cores.

Mike Kelly (54:06.574)
Right. that can be, that can be a dual core that's threaded to four. as long as there's four, kind of, if you run H-top and you see four, you know, my kids call them brains. If it's got four brains, uh, then, then that's good too. And of course the solid state drives a lot nicer, um, than, than a, than a spinning rust. However, I have free honed a bunch of these with spinning rust drives as well. And they take a minute to boot up, but they're fine.

Yeah.

Mike Kelly (54:34.634)
I have a Nixbook Lite version as well. And in fact, we have a dedicated installer now that you can just download an ISO and run it. So you don't even have to manually install NixOS anymore. Nixbook has its own installer, which is awesome. And you can choose between Nixbook and Nixbook Lite. Nixbook Lite is just Cinnamon, but it's stripped down a little bit more and it just has Firefox and there's no flat hub integration. So it's basically just like a Firefox.

Like less visual effects, things like that. So, okay. So the rule of twos. Dual core, two gigs.

Yeah, that's right. Okay. It says that in the installer too. Yeah. So yeah. So like if I have a system that's like kind of a dog, you know, it's like a Celeron with like two gigs of Ram and I'm like, you know, I can install Nixbook Lite on there and it's still a web, it's still a web friendly, you know, device. And my rule of thumb is like, won't, I won't give something out unless I can get onto it boots up within a few minutes.

and I can get onto YouTube and I can stream a video without it dropping frames like crazy, right? Like to me, that's kind of my litmus test. Like if it can do that, then I think it can be useful to somebody.

If it can do that, it's useful to a lot of people.

Mike Kelly (55:53.65)
That's what I'm saying. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. And I'm telling you, you can get these like, there's, I get so many of these, they're these HP streams. They're like these like,

don't know what you're talking about.

They were probably garbage when they were brand new.

With like the 32 or 64 gig EMMC. Yeah. We're built for built for Win. What was that variance that. Yeah. Windows S. Yeah. Yeah.

That's right.

Mike Kelly (56:20.312)
The S mode, Windows S, which stands for, nevermind, I don't know what this podcast is rated. Those actually upcycle to Nick's books great. I mean they're not fast. I would love. They're totally usable.

I absolutely love to see an actual performance comparison between Windows 10 S, is that what it was called? Yeah. Windows 10 S mode and Nixbook OS. I'd love to see that. So that'd be fun, a little fun video to do. So you've designed Nixbook OS and you have this growing project, this Pay It Forward computer project. What happens next?

Because it sounds like it can turn into a monster, or it did turn into a monster, you know?

So I mean, I'm just happy. Like I'm just happy that I built this OS that like my kids can use and I can slap it on these computers and give them out to people and like they can just go on about their merry way and it's great. But it's building momentum and people are starting to know me, right? And it's like, like just locally here. And like the local library chain even did like a, they reached out to me and they wanted to do an interview and we did like, they hosted an event that I did.

basically telling people about computer upcycling and that they don't need to throw their computer in the trash. this is kind of fun. Every talk I do, every event I do, I always bring laptops and give them away. yeah. And so my last, spoke at the sea seagull conference here in Seattle, just a month ago and I had five HP pro books that were all Nick's books and like gave them out at the talk. And it's just, it's fun because people think, my God, can't, but like, I get them for free.

Mike Kelly (58:06.786)
Like this is the point of the project is that like these things are just out there. so anyway, it's been gaining so much momentum. even, even my wife got really interested in it too, where she's like, man, this is really important. Like, you know, like, so she came to, she came to my talk at the local library and just saw how just drop dead, amazed people were at what was possible here.

And then even people in the crowd being like, what about Norton antivirus? I'm like, no, no.

Do I need an Ornandamirus? man!

No, you don't and they're like and they're just like but how and I'm like, my sweet my sweet sweet people like You have not tasted the Nectars that are available to us, you know, like it's just it's so awesome. I Think this hits so many things for people right like everyone I talked to gets really excited about this and it makes sense right because a We're reducing waste. So this is people hate seeing stuff to run away. At least I do

And I think most people do, right? They're like, Hey, here's this perfectly usable computer, but I got thrown in the garbage because Microsoft pulled support or Apple pulled support for it. Right. People hate that crap. The second is I think most people, they want certain rights. Like everyone, I believe that everyone in this day and age in 2025 should have access to a basic working computer. know I Like I just think that's a right.

Jason Evangelho (59:38.286)
Are enough of them out there?

that we and there is enough of them out there, right? So I think people could get behind that idea too.

Not if they have to run Windows 11.

No, no, of course not. So, right. So I think like people hate seeing waste. They love seeing people like be able to get helped out. Right. And then the third thing that this project seems to do is stick a finger in the eye of big tech. And I, it's just fun. It's fun to be like, yeah, the hell with you, Microsoft and Apple. Like one of my favorite machines to get are these beautiful IMAX, the mid 2010 IMAX.

Those are, that's beautiful hardware.

Mike Kelly (01:00:18.958)
beautiful hardware and they have been, they have been outcast by Apple for like years. And so I get a lot of them for free because people are like, I don't know how to do this thing. Right. And so I'll, I'll upcycle them to, I'll SSD them if they're not already SSD and put Nick's book on them and they fly and they're beautiful. And now it actually gets to sit on someone's desk and be used like as a daily driver.

My, my mom has a 2016, iMac. Yeah. And it's, it's almost useless with Mac OS on there.

There you go. Well, I have the answer for you. Yeah, and the cool thing is is in the the next book installer Big shout out to like there's a Matteo and Rajah's there's there's two guys on my github that have been just rock stars with helping Like because Nick's books an open source project. It's not just me anymore. Sure doing this like there's other people contributing which is awesome and These guys have been rock stars in like developing our own standalone installer

And so we have a Nixbook installer. That's a true live environment of Nixbook and an installer. And the cool thing is, you know how Broadcom drivers are always a pain in the butt? yeah.

You have to do the whole third party, then you have to add the secure boot key because you're doing that.

Mike Kelly (01:01:40.716)
And so, Apple's the worst with this, right? Like all the MacBook Airs and Pros and iMacs have the Broadcom drivers. So you need a third party wifi chip just for the install. And then after the install, you can fix it.

That's such a barrier for so many people too. That's a deal breaker.

So now Nixbook has those drivers pre-installed in the installer and in the installed system. So now you can literally just grab the ISO, burn it to a USB, whack it in your Mac, hold down the option key, boot to it and whack.

I love the it in your Mac. Yeah, I Lack it in your Mac. Lack it in your Mac. I like that. It maybe sounds a little dirty, too. It does. It does. It does. But yeah.

And yeah, it has just grown into such a movement that like my wife who is just Aaron who's a rock star, like she's like, no, this is ridiculous. We need to make this an actual thing. And so she put together a board. So we have a board now and we have, and just yesterday we got approved for a nonprofit status. now the computer.

Jason Evangelho (01:02:42.414)
That's fantastic. Congratulations.

The Computer Upcycle Project is now a registered nonprofit in the state of Washington. that's going to open up so many doors for us, which is really, really cool.

What kind of doors? When you, you know, just for some background for, people watching and listening, when you first mentioned this to me, resonated so deeply because I used to do this thing, called pay it forward builds in association with AMD where a friend and I would, we would have, we would have components donated to us by various, like by AMD, by Kingston, by Samsung, whoever you would build the PC. And then we would actually give them to people.

who needed a gaming PC. And I know need a gaming PC is kind of, well, who needs a gaming PC? But it was people in the community, know, AMD's red team, their fans and things like that who, you know, couldn't afford a decent gaming computer and they were all getting, the parts are getting donated. So me and my friend, we donated our time, built them, did a live stream of it and then gave it away. And I instantly wanted to get involved with the Computer Upcycle Project when you mentioned it to me, because it's just...

I love tinkering with old hardware. I love the satisfaction, the reward of like being able to give someone a good usable computer that they wouldn't otherwise have access to, you know, and anyway. So what kind of doors could this open?

Mike Kelly (01:04:08.44)
There's a big computer shop locally in Olympia. Everyone in Olympia knows it. It's called the Fourth Dimension. it's, you know, they sell new computers, but they also are a repair shop. They're mostly, I think they do repairs. And so I was talking to the owner last week and I said, hey, what happens when somebody comes in, they bring their computer in and it's like, you tell them like, it's just old. You like you can't get on the Windows 11. Like they're not gonna install Linux on it. I know that.

And so they'll sell them a new computer. Right. And they're like, wow, we throw them in the back and you know, every couple of weeks I call the recycling guy and he comes and takes them and they crush them up and melt them down or whatever. And so I told him, I told him about what we're doing in the computer upcycle project. And he goes, well, I'll tell you what he goes, as soon as you get your nonprofit status, come in, give me a copy of it. And I'll call you before I call the recycling guy. You can come into the back room, take what you want. And then.

And then the recycling guy can take the rest.

There's no difference to the shop, right?

No, they don't care. It's not taking money out of their pocket. And in fact, it's helping. now they can, you know, PR wise, too, they can say they're partnered with the computer upcycle project in Olympia. like, you know, it's a look. It's a good look. So like, if we do these events, and we say, like, hey, I have a computer, where can I drop it off to? You know, I don't give them my personal home address and like drop it off my porch, right? Like now I can say, yeah, you can take it to fourth dimension, they'll accept it for on our behalf.

Mike Kelly (01:05:39.532)
That's huge, right? And that doesn't happen if I'm just Mike Kelly. Like that happens when I'm Mike Kelly of the Computer Upcycle Project. We also got recently a hundred computers from Olifed, a local bank chain. And this bank chain just did a big refresh of their tech. And they had like over a hundred computers. And that they were just gonna...

So 100 computers and one drop laptops, I'm assuming.

They're mix. They're mix of like the small form factors and, and the laptops are easy to rehome. Like that's already in process. but the, but the small form factor computers, we're still not sure what we're going to do with them. we actually, I'm working on a Nick's book kiosk mode and we have this idea of having public access computers and coffee shops in places. Dude. Like that, that is just, that is just funded by the computer obstacle project and we can build Nick's book in a way.

So awesome.

Mike Kelly (01:06:36.962)
that it's self healing and self like, you know, they don't have to worry about maintenance of it. You know, that would be awesome.

So who is, I mean, you get a call and they're like, yeah, we've got a hundred computers for you. What then? Is that just Mike Kelly spending days repurposing a hundred computers by himself or?

or. Yeah, so I mean right now, right now most of them are in storage in this office. And so yeah, I kind of like chip away them as I can. You know, like it is my hobby, right? Like some people will read or do crossword puzzles or do all this other stuff. Me, I am always working on a computer. Like I'll have conversations with people while working on computer. It's just it's cathartic for me, I suppose. But yes, it can't scale with just me doing it.

And so that's another thing with this nonprofit is like, we're going to be able to do things like we have already set up the stage, like the room I'm in now, this is the coworking office. Like, we can rent this out and we can have like install parties. Cause I've also had other tech people reach out to me and say, Hey, I want to get involved like you, if you were local, you would totally come to a Linux install party where we have a pile of computers and we're like, Hey, Jason, here's the USB drive. We're going to.

I totally would.

Jason Evangelho (01:07:53.206)
In fact, you know, there's some really great hiking near Olympia. There is. I could find an excuse.

I'm telling you, mean, anytime you want to come, we'll have a good time. But yeah, and so there's people that want to get involved in it too. And so like, I do think that we can do this. And then instead of giving computers away one at a time, in a Facebook group, we actually want to have events where like, we're doing stuff. And so we've already done this once. And actually that's the picture that got you so fired up on Mastodon is we did an event at this low income housing.

where we brought a handful of Nick's books to let people use them and see how, you know, and see how they liked it. Like what did they get tripped up on or whatever? And 100 % of people had zero problem with it. They loved it. And they all got to take those computers home. So we like trained them on how to use it, although it didn't take much to train. Like I said, it's pretty boring and easy. And so those people got new computers and that was it.

And the directors of the low income housing were like, this is incredible. Can we do this again? I'm like, yeah, sure. We got a bunch of computers. So we're doing it again next week where we're giving, think like 10 or 15 more away and doing a class with it as well. like digital, like training, like training on like, here's the basic stuff. Like if you download a file, where does it go? You know, that kind of stuff. What really fired me up about that is like seeing those people who are just total tech newbies.

Right? Like they are not technical in any way, or form. And that's not a criticism. They're just regular folks seeing them open up a next book, turn it on, just start using it without any knowledge or training. Knowing that like all the updates will be automatic. Everything's handled for them and they can't break it. It's an, it's an, it's an immutable and breakable system go wild. And to see those people use Linux.

Mike Kelly (01:09:51.438)
Cause that's what they're doing. They're using Linux. They don't know they are using Linux, but they are. And to see them just have a perfectly good time. Just, it hits me in a place.

They do know that they're not using Windows though, right?

I know I remember one time someone reached out to me and they said Mike can you help me with this computer and I thought okay It's a Linux problem, right and she goes listen I hate to say this but like I gave I let my buck brother borrow my laptop He put Windows 10 back on there because he was like he's like, I'll fix it for you and he put one day on there It was already fixed So she messages me and she goes I am so

It was already fixed.

Mike Kelly (01:10:33.954)
pissed at him for doing that, she goes, can you please put Windows Mint back on there?

Windows meant. Yeah. It was meant. Yeah. Wow.

She called it Windows. Which both made me so proud but also broke my heart a little bit. like I was like, will do it. I will put Windows Mint back on there for you. I don't care.

If they do have a question though, where do they go for support?

I mean, so far, that's another thing I do is all the Knicks books, I actually give out a getting started guide and it's a PDF on the desktop, but I also print it out for people as well, because people love stuff printed out. And it has just the basics, like here's where to go to hook your Wi-Fi, here's where to go to change your font scaling if you want, like whatever. It's the basic stuff people need. But it has my email address on there as well. Yeah, it's been a little bit of an informal feedback process.

Mike Kelly (01:11:24.568)
But again, most people just haven't had an issue.

assume like you've given 1500 of these computers away that you're inundated with support requests of some kind and that's that's a testament to the stability of it.

If I gave away 1500 Windows computers, you know how busy I'd be?

That'd be a full-time job, probably. That's not an exaggeration either. I just, can't escape the idea that, you you've single-handedly for the most, pretty much single-handedly have upcycled 1500 of these computers in just your local community. if it was possible to scale that up.

Yeah.

Jason Evangelho (01:12:14.026)
statewide, the impact you could have on people, the impact you could have on the environment. mean, you know, the, and the quality of life that people have, that's gotta happen somehow. If people can just like, I want to take this and franchise it out. Boom. It's now in my city. I don't know.

Yeah, I mean

Mike Kelly (01:12:35.736)
Well, that's a big part of like what Nick's book is about. The whole reason I wanted to build this is to help myself, but also I want other people to do this. And I've had multiple people in other places of the world and country say, Hey, I want to do this. But like the big hangup I ever, I always had was like, I don't know what dish door to put on there. And I don't want to support them. Like they don't want to have to go over and like update dad's fedora every six months.

They don't want to do that. so Nick's book is a tool in that like goal, that mission of like, let's save as many computers as possible. So all you have to do is be a technical enough person to turn off secure boot, like change the boot order. You know I mean? And like install this and it should be dummy proof from then on.

And the fact that it even comes with a guide that you can print out and give somebody. Like those tools are now there. That's the whole point of Nick's book and the whole experience that we're doing is that like, can enable me, but it can enable people like me to do this anywhere.

Because there's gotta be, I don't have the current data, but I mean, there has to be millions of computers per year getting melted down and, just taking up space in a landfill.

On average, in America at least, on average, every four years is the lifespan of most people's computer. Most people get a new computer every four years. And corporate's the same.

Jason Evangelho (01:14:16.354)
I have a computer back here that I bought off of eBay for $300. It's a Intel i5-6600, eight gigs of RAM, terabyte hard drive, Radeon RX 570. And it screams. So the newest part in there is from 2017, so it's eight years old. And it absolutely screams.

Yeah. And that's another reason I wanted to get the nonprofit too. So we could actually go after grants and get some funding because, one of the things that we got a hundred computers from the bank, which is fantastic, but none of them have hard drives. They were all pulled and destroyed as per policy.

Well, sure, sure. And that's the thing is you don't want financial barriers like that to prevent this from moving forward.

And so, know, and you can get bulk, small SSDs for like 10 bucks a pop now, which is great.

about RAM?

Jason Evangelho (01:15:18.2)
Hopefully you don't need to buy new RAM for these.

The funny part is about that I'll have to send you a picture of my bucket of RAM actually multiple buckets because I have them broken out by type type and

Definitely don't give people your address now. Yeah, right. Because they're probably sitting on a gold mine.

There's a bunch of computers that like didn't make it, right? Like they had water damage or the motherboard was bad or, you had some kind of kiss of death, right? Where it just wouldn't boot up. And it's like, I don't waste too much time on those computers. But what I do is I part them out for spare parts and then E cycle the carcass. So I've done that enough times where I have such a bin.

of spare parts. got NVMe drives, got RAM in every type you can imagine. I pull out the LCDs on most of these as well. in over a dozen cases, I've been able to reuse an LCD, a screen, in another laptop.

Jason Evangelho (01:16:16.962)
This may not, this might not have happened yet, but I guarantee it will. But you know, have you had people reach out directly and go like just directly say, I want to do this. How do I get started?

Yes, I have locally and you know, I'm from East coast originally. So I still have a bunch of friends and family over there too. and again, one of the things is like, people are like, like either they want a laptop or they want to give me laptops, right. But they will live on the other side of the country. it's like shipping these things, isn't cheap. So like really to make this sustainable and smart, needs to be done. location, right.

No.

Mike Kelly (01:16:57.198)
So I do, I mean I have some nerdier friends back East who are like I want to do this too. And so that's what we're trying to do is you're trying to make a blueprint for this type of thing.

Absolutely. Gosh. mean, you have, you have built something very remarkable and very impactful. and I really hope that other people can take, you know, take the learning lessons that you've had and the experience and, and just blow this thing up in a good way, in a good way.

In a good way. Yeah. And again, I want to reiterate, like I'm just standing on the shoulders of giants, right? Like none of this would be possible without NixOS. None of it would be possible without like the people that donate. None of it would be possible without like, I mean, there's so much that goes into this. that's why I get so, people are like, you made an operating system? I'm like, well, kind of. I mean, I curated it. I put something together. But again, more and more as we go, like we're writing, like I'm actually getting into like writing Python GTK apps.

for like the welcome screen and like allowing people like go through. And so like more and more Nick's book is becoming having more code in it that's unique to Nick's book, right? But at the end of the day, we're still downstream from Nick's OS. And that's, I think that's great. We're inheriting a huge legacy of like just amazing stuff by amazing people. And then the...

Open source is amazing and I have people smarter than me helping me put all this together too. And so it's, awesome.

Jason Evangelho (01:18:34.05)
Now, if people want to just go play around with Nixbook OS, is there a formal site for it yet?

There is a launch yesterday. So next book, os.org.

so you had a very busy day yesterday. NextbookOS.org.

had a very busy day yesterday.

Mike Kelly (01:18:53.346)
That's right. And then that was, it's very simple. Like we're going to add more to it, but like by default it's a, it's a link to download ISO, which is the newest 25.11 with the Broadcom drivers built in. so that's our newest ISO. and then it's a link to the GitHub page where you can go ahead and raise issues, do whatever you want, you know, all the GitHub stuff. So it's, it's really cool. And.

Very cool. Very cool. I'm gonna have to play with it. I need to find a system to play with it on, but I can... yeah.

And then we also launched the computer upcycle project.org as well. And right now that's just a newsletter sign up because we're, you know, getting that built out as well. But if anyone wants to be a stay in the loop of like what's happening with the nonprofit, like events that we're doing, stuff we're putting together, computer upcycle project.org is also up. We did this donation. There's another nonprofit in the area that does some of this and they did, I volunteered to help them.

Do like an e-cycling event where people drop off all electronics not just computers, but all kind of disposable electronics and they did they took ads out on the radio and they put stuff in the newspaper for this and it was Slam there was like two semi trucks basically of Yeah, they had to call an extra truck down and this is an Olympia Washington, right?

So Olympia, what population about 60,000 people? I live in a larger city. didn't, wow. It proves, I think it proves that almost any community could benefit from this type of project. Again. No matter the size.

Mike Kelly (01:20:24.189)
Yes, I don't know, you tell me.

Mike Kelly (01:20:37.826)
When I started this, really assumed that there was only going to be a handful of people that were even interested in this. it has blown me away how much need there is out there, but not how much need, how much like excess is out there too. How much waste and how much need, you know, so it's like, there's a ton of waste. There's a ton of need. We can link the two together with Linux.

Mm. Awesome. So awesome.

It truly is Linux for everyone.

Linux for everyone. This is the dream. This is the dream. And you're helping make it happen. God, I gotta get involved. I wanna get involved in this. Yeah, I'm gonna have to play with it. Yeah.

I mean, it's boring. I was just talking to somebody and I was like, it's a pretty boring Linux distribution, but that's actually the point.

Jason Evangelho (01:21:31.118)
Well, yeah, there's some appeal for me at least. You know, as someone who did, I did all the distro hopping. pretty, I explore more now of curiosity and maybe a professional interest, you know, just doing this. I love, you know, it's very appealing to have something that I can just redeploy quickly on any system and boom, boom, boom. Everything the same, everything stable, everything familiar.

Well, Mike, I hope you don't get inundated. I hope you do actually. I hope a whole lot of people hear this and watch this and reach out to you with questions and opportunities maybe. I think that enthusiasm can be contagious and there's a lot of enthusiasm for this project.

Yeah, I do. mean, anyone who wants to get involved, by all means, you can copy what I'm doing. You could fork the project. You could play around with Nextbook. And then obviously, don't bust my balls if something's not working right or it needs to be better or something. I think this is the beauty of open source as well, is that we can all work on this stuff together. I think just the realization of anybody who takes anything away from this, it's the realization that there is, a ton of waste out there that's happening every day all around us.

And then B, there is a huge need for working basic computers. And those people aren't going to be picky about what OS they're on. They're just going to want something that works. like, we have all the ingredients to fix this problem.

Yeah, it's just getting organized and getting it deployed and getting, I mean, this, what you're doing, the computer upcycle project can literally benefit every community in the country. There's no question about that.

Mike Kelly (01:23:19.694)
believe so, Yep.

It's been a blast talking to you about this. And I hope that maybe a year from now we can, we can circle back and you can tell me, you know, about how there's a computer upcycle project in every state. you never know. You never know. The 1500 is now the 150,000, you know.

I've heard stories from people that have reached out to me years after I've gave them a computer and they've said, listen, Mike, I just want to say thanks again. Like I was able to like apply for a job and get it and like get off the street. I've had people reach out like they're, were getting out of recovery from drugs or just in bad life circumstances. like they needed some kind of help, right? Like just something, just a break somewhere to like help break that cycle. And.

An old laptop was what broke it for him. And that's amazing. So we can do that.

That's going to do it for episode 60 of Linux for Everyone. The main theme song you're hearing was written by my friend Jerry Morrison and recorded by his band, Baseball Bat. You can check out a link directly to that song in the description of this podcast. If you know someone in your community who is doing some amazing work, please reach out to letters at Linux for everyone dot net and let me know until we chat again. Take care and take care of each other.