Why Happy Ordi?
This project was born from a dual observation: millions of still-functional computers end up in the bin for lack of accessible alternatives, and the tools to fix this exist — but remain out of reach for most people.
Happy Ordi is both free software and an entrepreneurial project, built on twenty years of technical and hands-on experience, and on a long-held ecological conviction.
This page traces that journey, so that those who read it may grasp what is truly at stake : between planned obsolescence, the digital divide, and ecological urgency, Happy Ordi will be an answer born from the field.
Nature and technology
At the very beginning, as a child, I was drawn to nature, and also to technology.
After my school years I worked miscellaneous jobs. Then I earned a degree in Organic Farming, had a smallholding, and finally for the first time, my own computer and a 56k internet connection. I wanted to communicate about organic food and the concrete ecological alternatives I had encountered. That is how it all started.
A gradual evolution
One thing leading to another, hands-on learning and helping others along the way, I began providing services professionally starting from 2009, while also learning to rebuild distributions.
I started with PCLinuxOS for 3 years, then Ubuntu and then antiX Linux. My goal was to make lightweight distributions easy to use, and easy-to-use distributions lightweight, because back in 2009 you could have one or the other, but rarely both in the same distribution.
And it sounds easy enough to say, but I broke a lot of distributions before reaching the desired result. Around 2008-2009, the challenge was to have versions that worked well on all PCs while staying under 700MB for installation images, so that the system could be burned onto CDs.
From volunteer to professional
At that time, as the mother of a young child and not fully available for a complete professional activity, but with people coming by word of mouth asking for help with their digital needs, I chose umbrella company arrangements to meet their requests. A few years later I switched to a sole trader status and ran a shop for 5 years.
Self-taught, and faced with social unrest and the events of the pandemic, I changed direction and looked for a way to move forward.
Professional and student
Having discovered I could become a student again, I found both a school and a company. I completed an apprenticeship to open new doors, formalizing my expertise with a two-year diploma in computer science.
I got my diploma and lived through 2 very rewarding professional years. The doors I had hoped for remained closed, so this served as a catalyst to relaunch the project I had never forgotten about. This is how Happy Ordi was born and makes sense in the context of both my evolution and the increasing needs for a sustainable world.
A project built on experience
Rooted in twenty years of technical experience and user education, this project is grounded in a long-held ecological conviction that never left me, and offers a concrete response to the digital divide.
What I learned to do was to take ownership of and use the free software tools available to me, adapt the distributions I was rebuilding to suit the computers entrusted to me, and never overlook the details that help the owners of those machines understand how to use them.
These adaptations allowed me to generate hardware reports using lshw and lspci, to dive from within a live Linux system into the directories of a system that would no longer boot, in order to recover data, and allowed me to search for and repair filesystem corruptions.
Along the way
One day, while fixing a computer for someone out in the countryside, the client mentioned a PC she had thrown away when moving house.
As I talked with her, trying to go a little deeper and perhaps raise her awareness of the alternatives, she pointed me in a new direction: why did users never respond to words like “stability” and “security” : the leitmotif of free software enthusiasts?
Users simply did not understand what anyone was talking about.
Communicating locally
On another occasion, I created flyer mockups using GIMP and Inkscape, had them printed, and distributed them myself over a radius of more than 50 km, carrying this message: “Save your PCs! Make them last! Free diagnosis!”
Among other people, one woman came to see me with 2 laptops.
Her testimonial is still in the guestbook of my Orditux Informatique website: «Marie-Hélène from Pamiers wrote on 28 November 2015 at 1:35 pm: Thank you Orditux for your availability and efficiency. Thanks to you we have two computers up and running that were unusable under Windows. It is brilliant, you adapt quickly. Thank you again.» (Translated from the original message in French).
The normalisation of waste
These were not isolated cases. Over time, I observed more and more examples of individuals, businesses and organisations of all kinds with computers gathering dust in a corner, awaiting an inevitable end: the skip or the shredder. Yet what it takes to give them a second life is often just a faster drive such as an SSD, a little more RAM, sometimes a different processor, and almost always a well-chosen Linux distribution.
One day I thought it would not take much to democratise these methods by adapting them to users’ habits.
Brainstorming to rescue computers
Happy Ordi was born from this reflection: it would be a revisited and simplified live Linux USB drive, with associated services to facilitate diagnostics prior to optimising second-hand PCs. It would aim to democratise refurbishment through free software, for economic, ecological and social goals!
It would need to come with illustrated documentation, a remote support service to back up the operators using it, and shared technical knowledge in the spirit of mutual aid around refurbishment… It would also require testing and research around the hardware and software combinations best suited to handling the greatest number of still-functional computer models.
First tests
All of these steps are part of the preliminary testing I have already been able to carry out at least in part, from choosing USB drives to testing various Linux distributions dedicated to diagnosis, and identifying the strengths and weaknesses of 2 POCs (Proofs of Concept) already completed. The first dates from 2020 and was already a functional distribution.
The script opened ASCII messages in a black terminal window after creating a “hardware” file containing all the information about the PC’s components. It was useful for me, but not very meaningful for the few people whom I had asked to test.
What the field reveals
Before the second POC, I had conducted a series of telephone interviews in 2024 with around ten refurbishment organisations across France. The findings were staggering: not one of them used Linux to run tests and collect hardware information simultaneously. Some were still working manually through the BIOS. The majority sent to recycling anything that could not run Windows.
What emerged from these interviews is that refurbishment is time-consuming and running a business demands immediate profitability, so organisations sort incoming stock drastically, regardless of whatever tools they use to evaluate it.
In most organisations, as soon as pallets arrive, any model incompatible with the latest versions of Windows is eliminated straight away. It will not be tested for refurbishment.
Organisations that offer a selection of guaranteed refurbished PCs running Linux, making it possible to use older machines, are few and far between.
When the numbers speak
Over the years, particularly during the 5 years running a computer shop, I repaired and restored to full working order many PCs that other repairers would have written off, and this continues nowadays.
In 2020, I refurbished a 12-year-old Toshiba L300D-23U laptop by replacing the processor, RAM, and drive with an SSD. The still-functioning hard drive was repurposed in an external USB enclosure for storage, which requires less read/write speed than an operating system.
Similarly in 2025, a Clevo laptop around twelve years old went from 4 CPU cores to 8, from 4 GB of RAM to 16 GB, and from 128 GB of storage to 512 GB.
Computing waste is hard to justify in the global context of mining extraction and electronic waste management.
Recycling in crisis
According to the UNITAR Global e-Waste Monitor 2024, 62 million tonnes of electronic waste were generated worldwide in 2022 — across all categories, from smartphones to large household appliances, with computers representing only a fraction — and growing at a rate five times faster than documented recycling capacity.
Getting to the root of the problem
This is why, alongside ideas about tool ergonomics, the use of free software, and public perception, the development of Happy Ordi also involves research and reflection aimed at implementing a set of actions to optimise the time spent on end-of-life computers of all generations.
Happy Ordi relies on free software both for the diagnosis phase and for its working environment and infrastructure applications, and will highlight other known approaches that work toward the same goals in support of the circular economy and sustainability.
The race forward
More recently, as the most widely used operating system for everyday professional and personal use pushes millions of computers toward the skip with the forced transition from Windows 10 to Windows 11, while Windows 12 is already announced, more and more social groups are taking an interest in computing sustainability.
Among them, digital mediators, fablabs, repair cafés, associations and organisations that are beginning to measure the consequences of forced migrations, and for whom Happy Ordi will be a concrete and accessible response.
The technical foundation
The project currently rests on 3 different editions: Happy Ordi based on Bento Openbox Remix (Ubuntu LTS), and Happy antiX in 32-bit and 64-bit versions based on Bento antiX. This distribution remastering work began with PCLinuxOS around 2009, using an Openbox setup I had originally adapted for myself under Arch Linux, with the help of several people, to make it easy to use day-to-day and accessible to all users.
Three years later, I ported this setup to Ubuntu, giving birth to Ubuntu Openbox Remix, first published online in 2012 (codename “Bento Openbox”).
Then from 2022 onwards, I adapted the same environment to antiX Linux — a distribution that is both very lightweight and very refined, designed for older computers and based on Debian repositories since 2012. It provides 32-bit and 64-bit versions, and refuses to adopt SystemD: it retains legacy init and service management systems for greater lightness, responsiveness, and control over the system.
The respins created are named Bento antiX and are currently available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions (for PCs with 2 GB of RAM or unable to address more than 3 GB, and for better-equipped models that are nonetheless slow with other Linux distributions).
Happy Ordi and Happy antiX rest today on these foundations, built and refined over more than ten years.
Other distributions could also serve as a base for the project in the future, depending on identified needs and technical possibilities.
Currently in progress
Happy Ordi, which is both an open-source software and a business project, is advancing along several parallel tracks.
The Linuxvillage infrastructure, whose volunteer contributions have been online for many years, and which is the birthplace of the Bento Openbox and Bento antiX distributions, is regularly maintained and has been consolidated.
An active search for sponsors and partners is underway, with the aim of scaling up and spreading widely, and reflection on the next steps to follow is in progress, laying the right foundations and preparing each stage as the project advances.