Also don't forget BSD, ex: OpenBSD and NetBSD, may need to use older versions but potentially there could be compiled later versions of software than an old *nix.
I recall reading this article some time ago.
If you are thinking of an old kernel for running on a 386, I checked my current glibc 2.33, and the minimum kernel requirement is 3.2, which still supported the 386. gcc still supports the 386 today (hopefully they don't break it accidentally again). So based around that, if you carefully select what you really want to run, you could probably have a fairly recent linux software environment (who cares about the old kernel, 386 systems haven't changed much) running some useful stuff. (not everything)
But of course, the 386 was never really all that useful for linux due to lack of memory. If you can drop firefox though, you pretty much can run some kind of linux on anything. I'd be happy to lessen my use of firefox and chrome. If you look at the thread where Linus says drop the 486 support, someone responded reminding that they had not so far because 486 class systems were still being sold recently?? It seems linux still is useful on a 486. Somewhere.
For an alternative browser, I really do use lynx. In fact regularly on my eeepc 1000. If you really want graphical, I do like netsurf.
This is true that some 486 based devices can be still found in the industry as control boards for some kind of machinery. But I do not expect them to get regular OS updates. IMO those boards sit in well protected LAN isolated from any external access and stuck with one kernel version, usually the custom one with which the machine has been bought. Maybe some updates provided by the manufacturer in case of any critical issues with machinery itself, no more. I would expect any modern machinery control boards implemented with some ARM-based SoC which integrates everything in one chip except a coffee machine ;p There are plenty of ARM SoC manufacturers nowadays and Linux kernel support is much better for ARM than it was decade ago.
In context of a graphical web browser I would look for something other than Firefox when it is heavy for RAM and not only that. That is why I asked for any alternatives you know about. The key here is JavaScript support, CSS, SSL etc. And this damn SSEx requirement ... All we need here is to be able to browse 'static' web pages when even i686 based machine will struggle to handle any modern multimedia web page.
I'm updating this thread with some of my recent experiences with linux. T2 linux (t2sde.org) seems to be the only current linux distribution that supports old hardware. I was able to install it on my AMD K6-3 machine and most of the usual linuxy stuff works. Compiling packages is tedious, but cross-compiling is expected and works for most things. One of the more recent advances in linux is zram, and this is quite useful on older machines that don't have many GB of RAM to waste. T2 also has the latest kernel and gcc versions, etc.
nickles rust wrote on 2025-08-07, 15:37:I'm updating this thread with some of my recent experiences with linux. T2 linux (t2sde.org) seems to be the only current linux distribution that supports old hardware.
Set up a Gentoo install in KVM/libvirt with a raw image, and dd the image to a physical drive - that's what I did at the end of 2022 to get a distro that works on a 486. They still provide i486 stage3 ISOs and you can change the CHOST to make it an i586 build, which will at least give you a relatively recent version of wine that will run. This site is good advice for making a compact kernel, and with some sensible configuration you can get a bootable terminal with 24MB of RAM.
Shame that i486 support is being dropped after 6.15. That said, ISA video card support was dropped from Xorg at around 2008.
EDIT: found the spreadsheet I did back at the end of 2022, testing video cards and sound cards.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1epsE- … RtEtKvM9MqRTD4/
One video card not listed there is my PCI Geforce FX 5200, which does work and is even detected by mesa, but whenever I'd try to do any OpenGL tests I'd run out of memory. Sound card support is in a much better state overall for legacy hardware, fortunately.
