I need some help finding a distro for a very old machine.

It’s my family’s old desktop with 2001 components (bought in 2004) and a Pentium CPU that is NOT i686. I checked the exact model and architecture once but I don’t remember it now. The only thing I remember is that it’s not i686 so 99% of modern 32 bit distros don’t work on it (stuck right after grub).

The machine has 1 Gb of DDR1 RAM though so I think it may be useful or at least fun to play around with.

Now it’s on Windows XP that runs quite well but doesn’t support modern SSL certificates so it can’t browse the internet (idk how to fix it ok?).

Are there any Linux distros or other operating systems (preferably not deprecated) that I can install on it? And btw it does have bootable USB support.

  • TurboWafflz@lemmy.world
    0·
    5 months ago

    Perhaps openbsd or netbsd? They’re probably less likely to drop hardware support for your device in the near future than any linux distribution

    Freebsd is also an option but you would have to compile it yourself as the prebuilt binaries are currently 686 despite it having support back to 486

      • TurboWafflz@lemmy.world
        0·
        5 months ago

        I’ve never noticed BSDs being much slower, and if you’re already used to minimal linux distros like arch it’s not that hard to set them up unless you like need linux-only software.

        • GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.mlOP
          0·
          5 months ago

          I meant slower in terms of any rendering (web, 3D or anything else). And I’m only used to graphical DEs. I installed Arch via archinstall a few times and had a minimal Debian server with nothing except ssh working but that’s about it

          • TurboWafflz@lemmy.world
            0·
            5 months ago

            You definitely can install a graphical desktop on whichever BSD, you’ll just have to follow instructions online somewhere instead of running a premade script.

            If you want something really easy to use graphically right out of the box there’s also Haiku, it’s a completely independent OS that’s sort of an open source clone of BeOS but a lot more unixy than BeOS was. It’s really lightweight and has maybe my favorite desktop GUI out of every operating system I’ve used. The only real downside to it is that there isn’t an amazing web browser for it yet, the built in WebPositive is a little lacking in support for modern sites and GNOME Web, which you can install from HaikuDepot was a little unstable last time I tried it. If you don’t need to use the web a ton though (which is probably the more pleasant option on your particular system regardless of browser), it’s really nice.