I was just given an old nettop from I think around 2010 - An old Acer one nettop intel atom CPU N270 @ 1.60GHz 2GB ram, it has Windows XP on it and it seems fairly smooth/quick, but I haven’t done anything other than boot it up and check the spec. I was wondering what would be best to install on it and found that choices are very limited. Linux Lite nor Lubuntu seem to be an option anymore, and almost all of the options I tried under x86_x64 on Distrowatch no longer provide an x86 or 32 bit version. These are the main ones I have seen:
Damn Small Linux (DSL) - https://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
Puppy Linux - https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/
AntiX Linux - https://antixlinux.com/
CachyOS - https://cachyos.org/
Tiny Core Linux - http://www.tinycorelinux.net/
Maybe a couple of others, but could anyone recommend the best option or maybe a couple that would be best and any ideas as to what may be the best use for it? Practicing coding? Just browsing? Etc. I think it may be between DSL and Puppy, but I am hoping to hear any others and will happily try them all. Linux Mint and Debian keep coming up in searches but unless I am missing something, I don’t see anything about x86/32bit versions in the latest versions.
It looks like NetBSD and OpenBSD might be good OSs for 32-bit; the next FreeBSD version is dropping support. I don’t use any BSDs, but I think a BSD is probably the best-supported modern Unix operating system for this kind of hardware as the last of the major distros drop i386.
Linux distro support is really thinning out for x86_32, so for this use case; I’m sure the distros still exist, but they’re often niche projects. Gentoo may do the trick if you want to; I can’t tell if they compile their newfangled precompiled packages for i386 though, so if they don’t, you’ll probably have to set up a cross compiling setup from a more powerful x86_64 machine, which you’d need to use every time you update.
Thanks, I will definitely be giving them a try. I meant to look at FreeBSD about 15 years ago and was stumped. I have glanced at it over the years since, but never tried it again. I will definitely look at them. Thanks again.