RIngwood RC is contemplating supporting End of 10 and as part of that consideration I feel we need to get an idea of likely demand from the community …
Has anyone developed a community survey to gauge likely local demand for an End of 10 support initiative being tacked onto their repair café?
If you have, would you mind sharing the questions posed and an indication of how successful or otherwise the activity proved to be?
Good thought.
While I think it’s a great idea to encourage people to understand the issues and consider alternatives, it may be that we’re too late: many people may have already blindly accepted Microsoft’s position and chucked their old PCs out 
.
That’s a great question and idea. I’ve not personally seen such a survey yet.
But in case it is of use - at a recent webinar by Right to Repair Europe, Repair Cafe International shared some info on the popularity of their three recent pilot Linux Repair Cafe events in Amsterdam. These are my notes, hopefully accurate:
They have been running more in May and will continue in June. (one every fortnight it looks like).
Obviously Amsterdam is a big city. Great idea to have a way of gauging demand in smaller towns. Anecdotally, in my small town (10,000 people) I’ve had three people ask about this so far (2 of whom are other volunteers). But we’ve not done a great job of advertising it as something we can help with yet.
Our Repair Cafe is in the United States of America, state of California, city of Arcata. It’s a 4 hour event.
Population of Arcata is 18,00 people.
Neighboring towns within a 15 minute car drive are: Eureka 26,000 and McKinleyville 15,000.
The monthly Repair Cafe was started in April 2025 and had 180+ attendees. I think we worked on 6 computers at the Computer Repair Station.
May 2025 had 100+ attendees–it was Mother’s Day holiday and graduation for some schools, so that may have played a factor. The Computer Repair Station was slow and I think they just worked on 4 computers, and that was after I let a guest know we could repair computers and she went home and got it.
At the May Repair Cafe I had 3 demonstration Mint Cinnamon All-in-One computers set up near the waiting area, with a slideshow running to catch people’s eye. I remember talking to 3 people who were very interested in Linux.
Lots of existing Microsoft PowerPoint slideshows. We opened in LibreOffice and the formatting was slightly off. Her embedded videos didn’t work. She is very frustrated with Windows 11 and wants to use Linux. We booted Mint Cinnamon from her laptop and she succesfully tested Bluetooth, etc. Helped her make a bootable USB drive with Ventoy and Mint Cinnamon. She really wants to switch, but I don’t think it’s a good fit for her now due to her heavy usage of Microsoft Office. Staying in touch with her via text to help answer questions.
Has an old laptop. Wants to get away from Microsoft for privacy reasons and dislike of AI. Met up with her a fee days later and gave her a free Mint Cinnamon laptop to try out.
Interested because she has an old computer, but she didn’t bring it and biked from out of town. Said she would bring it to the next Repair Cafe.
The organizers got excited about offering Linux for older computers, so they are promoting it for our June 15th Repair Cafe. We’ll see what the turnout is!
Wonder if the new Hackney Fixing Factory would like to do similar as above, and want our old desktops, when they become available, but you will need transport to collect from Waterloo (and carry them to your vehicle)?
As monitors become broke, you may be able to acquire those too, but they are scarcer, as the field engineers will often ask staff to bin them, rather carry them for the approx 5 mile walk they each do every day. We may have few printers left, instead now have a photocopying contract, and laptops are on lease too.