appiah4 wrote:
yawetaG wrote:In general, the BSD's have great support for older hardware, better than Linux. FreeBSD is probably the most user-friendly, and Live CD versions are available, although if you really want to install it going with one of the latest versions probably is best.
Not Linux, but close.
Never used BSD before, I wouldn't know which distributions to look into at all.. I'll check Distrowatch for BSD distributions for older hardware.
No need for that, most modern BSD's will run on anything from a 486 upwards 😎 You don't need a distribution aimed at older hardware, the current versions will happily install on an older system.
For example, the LiveCD version I linked to booted without a flaw on my Pentium II machine, but loading the GUI took 10 minutes or so because it was a modern graphical interface - so make use of an older GUI (or no GUI) and it'll run with no problems.
I recommend FreeBSD because it has the best documentation and good online support options with friendly people. It also has a Linux compatibility layer, allowing people to run Linux software on their FreeBSD system. FreeBSD supports various platforms: i386 (what you need), amd64, PowerPC (and PPC64), SPARC (!), ARM64, and some more.
So is your system supported? Heck yes!
From the hardware compatibility list for FreeBSD version 11.0:
Almost all i386™-compatible processors with a floating point unit are supported. All Intel® processors beginning with the 80486 are supported, including the 80486, Pentium®, Pentium® Pro, Pentium® II, Pentium® III, Pentium® 4, and variants thereof, such as the Xeon™ and Celeron® processors. All i386™-compatible AMD processors are also supported, including the Am486®, Am5x86®, K5, AMD-K6® (and variants), AMD Athlon™ (including Athlon-MP, Athlon-XP, Athlon-4, and Athlon Thunderbird), and AMD Duron™ processors. The AMD Élan SC520 embedded processor is supported. The Transmeta Crusoe is recognized and supported, as are i386™-compatible processors from Cyrix and NexGen.
FreeBSD is like Linux, but better (IMHO): good hardware support in general*, good up-to-date documentation, you don't get insulted or told to program it yourself if you ask a stupid question, no SystemD, etc. Oh, and it can do everything you asked above.
*some exotic stuff might not be supported, on the other hand some very exotic stuff is supported... 🤣