Repair cafés keep old computers alive with Linux
Germany's two-year Opt Green project has ended, leaving more than 85 repair cafés offering free software installs for machines abandoned by vendors.
KDE Eco published a review on 22 July 2026 of Opt Green, a two-year German project funded by the Federal Environment Agency and the environment ministry, which ended in May 2026. Its question was narrow and practical: how do you keep computers in use once their software support ends and they are treated as waste? The chosen partners were repair cafés. An online presentation in March 2025 drew around 180 volunteers, a webinar in May 2025 more than 100 participants, and three in-person workshops took place in Hannover, Nürnberg and Dessau between December 2025 and March 2026.
By July 2026 more than 85 repair cafés and similar groups were listed on the End of 10 site, while Repair Café International listed 40 Linux repair cafés. Venues including Repair-Café Wendelstein, Reparatur Café Helmstedt and Haus Drei in Hamburg now offer Linux support. Repair debates usually stay on hardware, but much of today's electronic scrap is produced by software decisions: a working machine declared unusable because it is no longer supported.
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- KDE Eco · 22 July 2026
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