386SX wrote:I imagined that not being supported and patched there could be problems, but realistically are these old 16bit kernel based os still target for any possible sw bugs out there in a world of arm based linux based machines?
One way to find out...
It's a valid question in fact, but I wouldn't suggest testing too thoroughly unless you have a hotline to your ISP's abuse department (or you have an ISP known not to give a damn about malicious activities). Thing is that the number of Win9x/ME systems out there is very small, but the amount of effort involved equally so. If you're going to crawl the net looking for vulnerable machines, you might as well add some basic 9x/ME exploits in there just in case. I would if I was so inclined 😉
Anyway I try again the Debian way. If i use no gui which possibilities are there to launch gui based softwares? Or i can only use text based ones?
Yes and depends... long time since I dug around that deep, but iirc you can do stuff with fbdev. The biggest problem isn't even the window manager/desktop environment itself but the display libraries, particularly qt and gtk(+). They are the things with the big footprint and one of them is needed for almost every graphical thing out there. But trying to run graphical stuff without a display manager is not exactly default settings. If you're asking the question your level of knowledge and experience with Linux is probably not enough to do it.
One slightly less challenging thing you can do that will have significant impact, particularly on the RAM footprint, is to compile everything yourself with minimal USE flags. Gentoo is the go-to distribution to do this. The big gain is that default apps (i.e. in Debian's package management) generally have support for both qt and gtk. If you choose one and only compile in support for that one, some apps will shrink by over 25%. If you're in a situation where every Byte matters, that makes a lot of difference. Smaller file size also marginally improves I/O and CPU performance, but don't expect miracles from that. I did this once to get Linux installed on a P266MMX subnotebook (yes, I have a bit of a fetish for those things 😉 ) with max 32MB RAM. Took almost two weeks to get the base system compiled though and wasn't going to win any benchmarks afterwards either 😜
Anyway, even a paltry 768MB in 2018 is relatively vastly more than 32MB in 2006. One tip is to go for Firefox Quantum (i.e. >57). The difference between it and previous versions is absolutely huge on pretty much every system I've tried it on. That said. those have all been dual (or more) cores, and one of the big improvements is multithreading. No guarantees on a K6-2+
Reading all this I'd be very tempted to test it out myself. I recently acquired a K6-3+ - but the motherboard to go with it is lost in the mail, last seen in DHL's Köln depot 😢