What does the age of the hardware have to do with it?
You can run a 486 today with the latest Linux kernel, the latest C library, and the latest utilities. A 486 is not vulnerable to Spectre and Meltdown. It may be more secure than a typical i7.
Come to think of it. Acting as a bastion server may be a legitimate use of a 486 today.
The NVIDIA problems are historical.
You will notice the people that actually have NVIDIA cards all say NVIDIA works.
The people saying NVIDIA does not work are all using AMD. They may have owned NVIDIA in the past and there may have been issues. But those issues have been resolved.
NVIDIA is fine.
There were real issues with NVIDIA. They have been resolved.
That said, when something is “fixed” in Linux, it comes to different distros at different times. Some distros will get the fixes almost immediately. Others will not see them for 2 - 3 years. As we are within that window, how well NVIDIA works depends on what distro you use.
If you use an up-to-date distro like something Arch based (maybe EndeavourOS), things work well. Even fairly current distros like those that are Fedora based should be fine at this point. However, if you use something that moves a little shower, like Mint or especially Debian, you may still have problems with NVIDIA today.
AMD has worked well on Linux for many years and so it is a reliable choice regardless of distro.
Don’t forget that Intel exists as well. At the low to mid-end, they represent good value. They have good Linux support.
GNOME mostly abandons their old apps. However, in some cases, the Xapps project has taken over these older code bases.
https://linuxmint-developer-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/xapps.html
It should say 486DX or better as NetBSD requires an FPU.
But apparently somebody has been working on SoftFPU support and they just released a first version a week ago!
https://github.com/mezantrop/i486SX_soft_FPU?tab=readme-ov-file
Make sure it is not a 486SX. NetBSD requires an FPU. Linux is able to emulate one in software.
The Linux kernel is well over 30 million lines of code (lots of that is drivers).
This change shrinks the kernel by about 15,000 lines. That is not nothing, but it hardly moves the needle.
It is just one less thing to have to worry about and one less constraint to limit flexibility in the future.
Latest 486 “distro” released 3 months ago:
https://github.com/marmolak/gray486linux
Same userland as Alpine Linux. Newer version of MUSL than current Void Linux ships with. Up to the minute kernel.
The oldest kernel version still getting updates at kernel.org is from 6 years ago. So, we may still have active 486 support in official kernels for years yet.
Even after that, the kernel will stay available. You can always backport any important security fixes yourself.
And this is just the kernel. A 486 will run current c libraries for decades most likely.
You can still use Linux on 386 and Git commits as recent as a year ago say things like “adding support for new hardware”.
https://github.com/marmolak/gray386linux
Again, even on a 386 you have the same C library and userland as found in current Alpine Linux.
I switched to Mandrake for that (back in the day).
The latest kernels still work on 486 - kernel 6.14 currently.