[velodrome]

An indirect benefit is teaching the younger generation to be more proficient with linux.

Many of these old PCs can be used as hand-me-downs for young kids. Some of these kids will eventually work for the city and contribute to existing infrastructure. Also, let's not forget economies of scale (ie. labor, ecosystem, etc) to further reduce costs.

Makes sense to me. Think of this as dogfooding.

[keithpeter]

As I was reminded in another comment many Atom based 1Gb netbooks were sold with XP and a 160Gb hard drive. Such a machine can run ubuntustudio well, and allow a young person to do quite a lot with audio, images and some low-fi video.