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Is it worth trying to make money from buying broken laptops, repairing them (and maybe try installing Libreboot onto), and then reselling? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I just love working with computers and I have a bit of money. Problem is that I don't have a job, and this hobby is quite expensive. So, I thought of perhaps trying to make at least a little bit of money from it by buying old and broken laptops, repairing them, and then reselling them. Perhaps if I get a laptop that's compatible with Libreboot, such as the Lenovo ThinkPad T480, I could also flash Libreboot onto it.

Nevertheless, I'm also planning to get a real job soon.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 weeks ago

Parting out the laptops is probably more profitable than repairing them. There are people who will want to repair their equipment, and the supply of parts isn’t going to be infinite. If you have the space and time, holding onto parts would be worth it.

As for LibreBoot, you’re probably better off figuring out how to build your own boards around that. CoreBoot and LibreBoot are cool, but the equipment is old. People would want more modern equipment.

Off the top of my head, an Arm board with some MediaTek chips with LibreBoot which can pass Arm System Ready tests might be interesting. The SBC space is full of junk which isn’t upstreamed in Linux and thus can’t run a vanilla kernel, so there is an opportunity there. Something which could run Debian and OpenBSD would be the idea.