On Debian, i386 is now i686.
https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/release-notes/ch-information.en.html#i386-is-i686
LeFantome
joined 1 year ago
They are really i686 though ( from Bookworm on ).
Antix 23.1 is based on Debian bookworm, so I think it requires i686 now. Older Antix releases ( based on Bullseye or earlier ) should work.
Have an upvote from me
Slackware says it still supports everything that the Linux kernel supports ( which would include Pentium ).
http://www.slackware.com/faq/do_faq.php?faq=general
Find it here:
https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/slackware-isos-and-torrents-4175709111/
I thought so too but nope…
https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/release-notes/ch-information.en.html#i386-is-i686
That said, this is a recent change ( Debian Bookworm ) and so Debian 11 ( Bullseye ) still supports Pentium. Debian 11.9 was just released in February.
Could even be Cryix or a VIA or something from back then. VIA lacked cmov and will not boot i686.
What 32 bit distros have you tried? I would think most would still support Pentium as kernel support has not been removed.
AntiX and Q4OS are both decent choices.
For a machine that limited, I would probably give Damn Small Linux a shot:
https://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
It is Debian based ( actually AntiX ) and so it has access to the full Debian universe ( 32 bit at least ) but has a curated list of applications well tailored to low-resource environments.
Some have said Debian is i686 only but this is what Debian says:
Edit: I take it back
https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/release-notes/ch-information.en.html#i386-is-i686
Debian, AntiX, DSL, MX, and Q4OS are all Debian based and so no longer support i586. What a shame.
Edit edit:
That said, this is a recent change ( Debian Bookworm ) and so Debian 11 ( Bullseye ) still supports Pentium. Debian 11.9 was just released in February.
But bhyve is a hypervisor ( VMs ) and Bastille is jails. Neither of those is a solution for running OCI containers.
More up-to-date packages can be an advantage. One, they may have features you need. Two, there may be compatibility issues. This is especially true of dev tools and the graphics stack. The packages in Debian Stable are not that old yet but they will be.
You should give FreeBSD a shot sometime but it is probably not the best choice for a laptop honestly. If you do want to try it, maybe give one of the desktop FreeBSD distros like GhostBSD a try.
If you already like Debian, why not stick with that? If you want to try Mint, maybe Debian Edition ( LMDE ) would be a nice compromise.
I assume your comment is about FreeBSD but Ubuntu 24.04 is Linux “software released a few weeks ago” and it did no better than CentOS Stream 9.
FreeBSD led on quite a few benchmarks. Quite interesting.