I've personally found that the various BSDs support older hardware much better than Linux does.

Also the BSD ports system is in my experience more likely to get a given piece of software running on non-standard hardware than a binary package from a Linux repo is. The BSD maintainers might put a hit out on me for saying this but ports works a bit like the AUR from arch -- you're compiling most of it on your own hardware with custom build files made by the maintainer.

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Felt compelled to register because this topic is a pet hobby of mine, hi everyone.

I've been playing with modern OS / old hardware combos for a while. FreeBSD seems to tick all the boxes. Building from ports is slow but seems to offer a performance benefit with the end binary (poudriere is a great bit of software for being able to build on quicker machines and run a package repository for old computers).

The problem with hardware beyond a certain age is often now graphics acceleration support. DRI 1 supported a lot of old hardware but I don't know a distro where it hasnt been deprecated. The 'radeon' driver still supports hardware all the way back to R100 which is nice. With FreeBSD and modern intel drivers, ive found anything before a GMA950 doesn't work. The generic 'vesa' driver works in nearly all cases but imo its too sluggish to be nice to use.

If I remember right, FreeBSD 9.2 was the last with DRI1 support.

Oldest thing i had running with recent FreeBSD was a ThinkPad 600E. Needed patience but it was surpringly nimble once it loaded X (using an openbox / lxpanel combination). The neomagic card in that has a decent X driver last I checked.

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Anders- wrote on 2021-09-21, 14:35:

This is strange as the shipped binaries are supposedly built using the ports system. Can you provide any benchmarks that indicate a difference?

It's odd. My best guess is that specifying a target CPU family in make.conf is what makes the difference. It might be something so benal as the binaries being smaller.

I could benchmark it but i'll have to look into how.

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Anders- wrote on 2021-09-21, 15:24:

Cool, I wonder what the difference might be.
Welcome to vogons btw! 😀

Thank you! 😁

It's kind of funny reading the replies here when I know that this exists: https://wiki.aosc.io/aosc-os/retro/intro/

I've run it on a Pentium MMX and it's blazing fast in the CLI and acceptable in the GUI. Not sure how it would perform on a 486.

Of course web browsing is as limited as on any other OS. Just be okay with basic text and images, Wikipedia, etc. and no YouTube.

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Anders- wrote on 2021-09-21, 16:07:

The problem, as I see it, is that when folks say "user-friendly" what they really mean is "bloated eye-candy with animation and sound" - and that most certainly won't roll on old hw 😁

You got it.

Anders- wrote on 2021-09-21, 16:07:

I reckon most commandline based setups are fairly quick on old hardware, exception being stuff that involves crypto (try to ssh on a 386!).

If you're using ssh or any other modern crypto-related software for that matter on older (or even some modern -- e.g. ARM) CPUs like that that don't support AESNI, I strongly recommend using the chacha20-poly1305 cipher on such systems (it's arguably a better cipher than AES in general -- AES-GCM specifically if you're comparing apples to apples -- but AES has the advantage of hardware acceleration via AESNI which easily makes it faster than chacha20-poly1305 on CPUs with that feature).

I have a T23 and Firefox used to work with it up until a few years ago. I recently went to run some updates on it (it hasn't bee […]
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I have a T23 and Firefox used to work with it up until a few years ago. I recently went to run some updates on it (it hasn't been used it in a while) and found Firefox no longer works, it throws an "invalid instruction" error when launched.
The last supported version appears to be this one (from what I could find):
firefox-45.9.0esr.linux-i686.sdk.tar.bz2 134M 18-Apr-2017 16:20
The last time I remember Firefox working, was in the middle of 2018, but the Firefox package was likely stale by that point, and the distribution maintainer was reluctant to update since it was "the last one".

When Firefox could still run on it, it was able to work with most webpages that didn't require heavy use of JavaScript. I used a JS management plugin with it, so they didn't run by default and overload the CPU. Anyone know of any "modern features" browsers that still work with pre-SSE2 machines? Netsurf works with it, but it's not compatible with some websites requiring newer JS features.

The pre sse2 cpus were officially dropped from the support list of all relevant browsers in the middle of 2018 (Firefox 52.9 ESR, Seamonkey 2.49.4, Palemoon SSE 27.9.4 were the last ones on Linux, under Windows even earlier).
Although you can still unofficially compile browsers for without sse2 or without sse, and even for i586, here are some I have compiled. For example, under Debian 8 with a Pentium MMX with enough ram to run the latest PaleMoon i586 rebuild "smoothly" (if you're patient enough and really just want to browse and read ), and with smtube yt-dlp mpv/vlc combo you can even run it in 240p in youtube.

Under Linux, Arch was the first to drop 32 bit, sometime around 2017, then Fedora 30 was the last 32 bit version (it ended support sometime around 2020), Ubuntu 18.04 LTS was the last 32 bit version to be supported, although full support expired in 2023, with security esm updates going for +5 years (as with 14. 04 and 16.04 will still get esm support), Centos 6 was the last fully supported 32-bit version (until 2020), although the 32-bit version of 7 is still supported (until 2024), but it has SSE2 as a prerequisite, and additional packages (e.g. Epel) often have to be compiled from source rpm. The last mohicans still actively developing for 32 bit (i686 without SSE, so Pentium Pro/Athlon is the minimum requirement) is Debian, the latest 12, 10 and 11 are still actively supported, if you add elts (8 and 9 are in this phase), Debian has a long 32 bit death. The current (15.0) 32 bit version of Slackware will still run on i586 (Pentium/K5/Cx6x86/etc although unfortunately the graphical interface requires sse2), but even 14.x versions will get security updates until 2024 (14.0 and 14. 1 will still run on i486 (min DX), Debian 7 was the last to have an i486 (DX) kernel, which elts support ended in 2020). The Tumbleweed (rolling) version of OpenSuse is still available 32 bit, although it has a minimum system requirement of i686 SSE2.

I have a emachines 510 that original it came with a celeron m550, but i had immedatly upgrade at a T8100. With 2GByte of RAM and a SSD It smootley run lmde 5 . An initialy leak of 5/6 second when charge login window but After that Is enough flawlies .

In a second macchines i run anti mepis 22.1 . It's a netbook a Dell 910 for browsing internet Is acceptable but when load Pages full fil of banner and popup take too much time for complete the Page load.

P.S. : i 'd installed 32 bit versione lmde 5 .