I've got an Acer Aspire One that is slow but i Iove the form factor. It is really good for email and document tasks, just really light and comfortable and the battery lasts ages. Gonna be sad when 32bit ends

I can wholeheartedly recommend NetBSD if you want rock solid and eternally dependable backward compatibility forever.

slackware also has 32bit btw :)

There are still distros that support 32-bit besides Debian 12, like Alpine and Void. Until when, that's unknown.

I tried to re-use a phone for some command line stuff.

There's a lot of arm 32 stuff that's not working, so it makes it much more difficult

This was me, pulling out an old netbook trying to figure out which distro it could still run. 🫤

What all 32 bit stuff do you need to replace?

I started using 32 bit stuff after experiencing how they tend to be much lighter on memory. A 32 bit os can make a 2~4gb machine very usable. I even find myself thinking if changing everything to 64 bits was really necessary

"Double old plus" in newspeak.

o7

It really is amazing how far back Linux reaches.

That was the case

iirc the Linux kernel dropped support for pre-Pentium x86 in the last few years, so any distro with 486 support now would be using an unmaintained kernel.

I think if you want a maintained operating system for your 486 today, NetBSD is probably the thing to run.