Damn Small Linux 2024 - Will it work on this Pentium 3?

Time to dig out the old Dell Dimension Pentium 3 and try to bring it to 2024! In this video we will install a less than 700mb Linux distribution from one CD-R called Damn Small Linux 2024 and see if we can use it today! Will it install? Will it get online? Let's find out!
#linux #dell #dimension #pentium #intel #installing #operatingsystem #cdr

[@mackjsm7105]

OMG.. bud.. this video not only chills.. but so many memories.. This Dell was my FIRST computer that I bought.. I STILL have it in my garage. SO many memories.. Glad I found you channel.. Crazy how time goes by so damn fast.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Hahaha so true! I experience so many memories each time I do a video.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Awesome!!!

[@edsiefker1301]

Pull it out. Enjoy 2001 for a while.

[@mackjsm7105]

@@edsiefker1301 Oh I already did brother.. I miss the 90 and early 2000s.. they world is so fuct now... elitists taking over the world. .. War.. hopelessness.

[@davidtuomi8361]

DSL was never really a beginners distro, it was just designed to run on low end hardware. And you show the real disadvantage to low end hardware. Modern web browsers are basically huge mini-operating systems all their own. And to use any of the modern web technologies demand much more computing power than you have available here.

[@AtoManPL]

DSL compactness and small requiremens made it perfect to run on VMs for education - we used it in my tech uni a lot, and one of the project required a java-based website running off Apache in DSL VM. Basically anyone had a PC that could handle this just fine.

[@davidtuomi8361]

What i generally used DSL for myself was as a diagnostic tool. I used to work in low-end industrial TV production. We'd need computers to be teleprompters or graphic editors or the like. Our department always get cast-off low-end computers with their HD's wiped. Before I even tried putting Windows or whatever on them, I'd run DSL. Using DSL I then would know what hardware was in the machine, what drivers were needed, and the general health. DSL would only boot on fully working machines. Any memory problems, etc. would show right up. So I always loved DSL for what it could do. But it can't make a computer more modern. You have to temper your expectations to the hardware you're using.

[@tarajoe07]

Power and instruction sets

[@GGigabiteM]

Modern web technologies don't demand more computing power, terrible trash browsers full of bloat, inefficient code and memory leaks demand more computing power. Even modern hardware has trouble with modern browsers. Firefox and Chrome are enormously bloated dumpster fires full of terrible code, grossly inefficient rendering engines and APIs and memory leaks, oh boy the memory leaks. IE 11 is new enough to support some modern web standards, and it is blazing fast compared to modern versions of Chrome or Edge on older hardware. And if I run an SSL stripping proxy, my Quadra 605 with a 40 MHz 68040 and 68 MB of RAM can surf the modern web with Netscape Navigator as fast as its 10BaseT Ethernet connection will take it. Programmers over the past 25 years have gotten increasingly lazy and more reliant on enormous API libraries to code, rather than writing functions themselves. Many of these APIs are grossly inefficient and slow at doing whatever they're supposed to do, which could be done writing their own code much faster. But with machines as fast as they are now with as much memory as they have, they don't have reason to care about resource usage, despite tens of thousands of people bitching about Chrome or Firefox eating gigabytes of memory with just a few tabs open.

[@Fxltl]

DSL is great for running in web based emulators

[@monkeyman767]

DSL's 50mb pack saved my ass countless times during college and attempting to dual boot OSX and Windows with early Bootcamp

[@TheRetroRecall]

Haha others have shared similar experiences with this OS. It seems pretty cool and the fact it ran on the p3 is impressive.

[@bellshooter]

The limitations are not set by the software system but by the legacy hardware that limits what can be done. This is the best you could achieve with that hardware and not have a slideshow experience!

[@TheRetroRecall]

Good to know, thank you! It will be interesting to try different hardware to note the differences.

[@kopspijker3515]

@@TheRetroRecall What I noticed during boot(of the live session) is X being configured to use the VESA driver. That is just and unaccelerated framebuffer. What kind of video card is in that machine? Support for older video cards is getting more difficult though. Oh and try a multi socket P3 😉.

[@Lady_Zenith]

Most of the reason why even scrolling/resizing and such is so slow are the GPU drivers. Back in the day you could scroll smoothly on IE5 on 486 computer, and the same webpage now would be slideshow and consume 20x more memory. That was because the whole browser was written to use basic directdraw acceleration. Today's browsers use ton of modern GPU 2D acceleration functions that the older GPUs, even if you have a working driver, do not support. Not to mention just because you have a driver, it will do anything to help if such driver is like 15+ YO. Great example is, I have a IBM T60P laptop with Firepro that is based on Radeon X1300. The latest open or closed drivers are like 15+YO, and yes they work, you can run old openGL stuff, set resolutions correctly, etc, but with modern web-browsers they accelerate nothing. It cannot even smoothly resize/move the window even if no page is open, simply because the browsers started using API calls that the driver does not know. Mind you the machine has Core2 duo at 2,33Ghz and back in the day could play 1080p videos on youtube when it was still flash based, now it cannot do even 720p, cause the resizing/upscaling itself is not accelerated anymore. I even tried various small linux distros on that, and sadly, due to the state of GPU drivers it runs even slower than windows. In a fact, what struggles the least with modern browsers is 32-bit win7. What we need are modern GPU drivers for those old GPU chips, that at least understand the 2D API calls and so not everything ends with "oh, I don't get it, throw it to CPU as basic VGA emulation" and good luck making someone write that. Without that, none of those machines will ever be practically useful again.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Good call out - so would this support a Dual Slot 1 P3 I wonder?

[@imeakdo7]

​​​​​@@Lady_Zenithit could also be because video codecs today on youtube are very different and hardware acceleration is only used for drawing on the display and not for decoding the video. That's on a 5th gen laptop i3 cpu with integrated graphics on Firefox under fedora. Even on a Ryzen 5600h with integrated graphics the video is never decoded at all in hardware put purely in software, maybe because there is no hardware acceleration for KZbin's codecs

[@chriswillis4960]

DSL is a great distro, I also reccomend you try the system the modern version is based on AntiX, which is a little bit more heavy (and political) but has more options of software, thought these Distros are not ment to focus on New Users but rather users who want or need to run their systems on really low end hardware. While you cant do much with the web browsing aspect (its great for basic things, but it cannot handle heavy sites like youtube) you cant use it to do word processing and office work, watch videos/movies provided the res isnt too high, listen to music and other basic tasks. I would argue these systems are a great dual boot option alongside an older OS on low end machines so you can have a system that can safely connect to the internet and get files or such you may need if you dont have another way to do it, but who doesnt have a USB or CD they can transfer files with manually.

[@patricktrakzel9657]

Indeed, the modern web is heavy, sometimes too heavy for old machines.

[@TheRetroRecall]

For sure. Definitely not a beginner Linux but amazing that they have distros that run on this hardware. It was a fun experience.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Yes as was in this case I believe

[@maxtornogood]

I did sorta know about DSL but not a 2024 edition, thanks for bringing this to light!

[@TheRetroRecall]

No problem! It was a fun experience for me as well.

[@MaskedGEEK]

Every time acronym is used, DSL, I always think of the term used to describe a dedicated DSL high speed internet connection back in the late 90s and early 2000's. Fitting since this is a modern OS that can run on old machines.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Hahaha true!

[@justthisguyyouknow666]

Lynx is a text-based browser from the very early days of the WWW. Still quick and useful for searches and text-based online docs.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Thanks.

[@KomradeMikhail]

Many of the things you got confused by here are non-modernized throwbacks to the early days of linux.... And even UNIX before that. Examples like right-clicking blank space to get a menu, or switching between Workspaces, etc. Even modern linux users can have trouble when they run into these outdated concepts. Like having Windows11 users try out DOS with Windows 3.1 for the first time.

[@kathrynradonich3982]

This so much. Would love to see how people who didnt use the older environments would get along with CDE or the like lol

[@thepinktreeclub]

puppy linux user here, im darn used to it

[@TheRetroRecall]

Yes for sure. There's a lot to learn and some of these behaviours / features definitely threw me off haha.

[@xamp_exclammark]

The right click menu is a feature of fluxbox window manager actually,probably its most notorious feature

[@KomradeMikhail]

@@xamp_exclammark No, it's much older than that... It goes back to CDE on UNIX before linux even existed. You can still find it in most Window Mangers, rather than Desktop Environments... Flux, IceWM, JWM, etc.

[@Sb129]

Aww man, i remember using the old version like 17 years ago, very handy as it worked on damn near everything. It is really cool to see that they brought it back and all within a single CD!

[@TheRetroRecall]

Yes, the definitely accomplished their goal, it was neat to see running on a P3.

[@youtubiers]

I remember this dell model was our first desktop PC we had when I was a kid. Ran Slackware 10-11ish, with custom compiled 2.6.16-ck6 kernel with KDE 3.5, Firefox 1.x ... Nvidia TNT 32mb AGP card. 160mb ram. Played Wesnoth, Neverball, bzflag... GCC 3.4 was new. Gimp, K3B, Amarok - some good software. The system ran well

[@TheRetroRecall]

They were quite popular back in the day.

[@rajatanpacelana]

I used the DSL in past because its was so nice to explore I had it almost a year on my pc also feather linux knoppix and puppy.. I really enjoyed...

[@TheRetroRecall]

Yes I'll have to try those other distros out as well!

[@Demobot1]

I remember running DSL on my modded Xbox just after college. Ah memories.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Haha no way!

[@louistournas120]

MS was selling the XBox at a loss and trying to make a profit on sold games. But you used it to pleasure Linux?

[@Demobot1]

@louistournas120 Yeah. It was a thing to try and do after I installed my smartxx mod chip. As well as installing a 200gb and the remote power on mod. Oh and I still played games on it.

[@ianab]

The old hardware is just not up to modern web work. Network speed isn't an issue as 10 mbit can browse the Web and run KZbin, IF the hardware can render it fast enough. DSL is sp stripped down so that old hardware can at least try and run it, but it can't perform miracles

[@TheRetroRecall]

Yes for sure. I'm working through the comments and a lot of other users have shared this perspective. It's much appreciated and makes sense.

[@Dutch-linux]

Linux mint is the best distro for beginners ... and for the web being slow on DSL.. is that the cpu is not fast enough for the modern php and javascript to render at real time.. that is not the fault of the distro

[@michielvanderwinden9286]

PHP is server side, so it's mostly JavaScript but also websites loading loads of packages and files (asynchronously) for anything and everything like front-end frameworks, CSS, ads and the like. Each of those files are (in most cases) served though HTTPS and thus your browser has to do encryption and decryption which preferably uses hardware inside the CPU that is not or only partially available in a P3 CPU. Any browser that would perform better would sacrifice compatibility or fail on certain newer types of encryption in favor of performance.

[@CommodoreFan64]

I personally disagree as I've worked for a non profit for seniors for a living running a senior center for the past 2 decades, and many of them have never used anything other than Windows, Android, or iOS/ipad OS, and Solus Linux with their flagship DE Budgie has been really easy for them to use, and I've had several of them switch over from Windows to it with good success. Also till Mint makes their Debian Edition the main focus I can personally no longer recommend them being based on Ubuntu, and all the shenanigans going on with Canonical in recent times.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Appreciate the info from everyone on this thread. Interesting perspectives based on experience. Thank you!

[@raughboy188]

The way you said it DSL can work on old pentium but to bring retro computers back to life in best possible way it's good idea to upgrade them as much as possible to be fairly usable.

[@TheRetroRecall]

True, however I still don't think this would be very usable.... I mean not using a p3. I did approach this however with the cpu and memory this system came with much like an end user would try seeing if they could get their old system operational again in 2024.

[@gregghernandez2714]

Another excellent small, very user friendly Linux distro is Puppy Linux. It is very polished because it has been around for so long. My favorite is still Linux Mint. Very simple to use and very clean. Highly customizable as you know. Great review. Thanks.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Thanks and yes many have stated they enjoy Puppy. I'll have to give it a try!

[@puppy_BYTE]

very nice presentation, can u do the TinyCore?

[@TheRetroRecall]

Thank you! Yes definitely. It's on the list :)

[@samuelbanya]

You should have used terminal applications in your workflow, including tmu, w3m, ranger, midnight commander, and a few older source game ports or to get stuff working with wine and emulators. These machines are really only super useful to run older Windows software. Otherwise they're too old to be useful as servers.

[@TheRetroRecall]

I love the approach of 'should have'. I literally said in the video that I am a novice user approaching it from that mindset. So again, I don't think there is any right or wrpng on the workflow - it was simply seeing if I could install it, would it work and then explore :). Thanks for the feedback however.

[@BenjaminWSong]

didn't matter what the topic was.. the moment I saw Dell Dimension, my finger clicked the link. It's good to see the machine that was aside of me during my University years still kicking... Had Linux installed on it back then and it served me quite well.. thank you for your video.. =)

[@TheRetroRecall]

No problem!! Glad you enjoyed!

[@jamesdye4603]

At one point I was experimenting with older systems and what OS could be run on them, and at some point will be doing it again. I've heard of DSL but never explored it, and I was using a distro called "Puppy Linux" on a laptop that originally had Win 95 on it. I think I'm going to try DSL on my Gateway Essentials 500 Pentium III system, of which I am the original owner. I found out, as others here have pointed out, that the main roadblock to surfing the web on older systems is the hardware. I don't know if it is mainly the architecture of the processors or things just simply run too slow for the computer to make sense of the input. Thing is, it's fun to try these things out and see what you can get working and what you can't.

[@kathrynradonich3982]

Try TinyCore on the windows 95 era PC. My ThinkPad 770 that came with 95 runs it decently given the hardware and reasonable expectations.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Absolutely and yes I think he hardware in this case was the limitation. It was still fun though seeing it work on the older hardware.

[@TheRetroRecall]

I've heard of tiny core - I'll be checking this out too!

[@kathrynradonich3982]

@@TheRetroRecall it takes some fiddling around and helps to download some cores you might need for drivers/software if your internet doesn't work out of the box but it's a nice lightweight system for the older machines

[@TheRetroRecall]

Thanks for this!

[@kevinshumaker3753]

DSL was my favorite "Business Card" linux back in the day.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Haha I've been hearing it referred to as that.

[@kevinshumaker3753]

@@TheRetroRecall It was a 'Business Card' linux because it fit on a business card cd-r that you could buy and burn. www.duplication.com/images/T/cdr-bizcard-silver-shiny_200.jpg

[@simonlathwell]

Thanks for doing a review on Damn Small Linux. I've got an Acer Veritas N281G thats got an Intel Atom D425 @ 1.80GHz, 2GB RAM, and a 320GB HDD, and it's got the Windows 7 Pro licence key on it still. I'm gonna upgrade the HDD to a 256GB SSD, and upgrade the RAM to 4GB. Thanks to your review of DSL that's what I'm gonna install and get running the way I want it. I'm now an avid Linux user and have Zorin OS on my main system, and Ubuntu Server on my Dell PowerEdge SC1430 which is close to being a retro server as it's 20 years old now. It'd be nice if you done a review of Zorin OS as it's a really nice Linux distro based on Ubuntu. As always another great video.

[@TheRetroRecall]

I really appreciate the feedback and glad I inspired you to try DSL! I will add Zorin to the list :)

[@santory11]

@simonlathwell i think Q4OS it will be better in your system (before any upgrade) The minimal hardware requirements: Plasma desktop - 1GHz CPU / 1GB RAM / 5GB disk Trinity desktop - 350MHz CPU / 256MB RAM / 3GB disk

[@manw3bttcks]

Just to note, the kernel version DSL 2024-rc4 comes with is: 5.10.188 DSL is up to 2024-rc6 but distrowatch is where I got the kernel version and it's behind a bit. "Term apps" is "Terminal applications" because that's what they are. And "links2" is referring to "elinks" which is a text only web browser hence it's a "terminal apps". W3M is also a very basic text only web browser.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Thanks for this info!!! Much appreciated. I'm learning all of the time.

[@sheldonkupa9120]

People often hear, that linux is running well on old hardware, and while that is true its often misunderstood. Some hardware, like intel atoms etc are really limited. I tested a lot, and while the OS may run acceptable, as soon as you fire up an internet browser, it doesnt work well. So the issue is rather the apps than the OS! Linux runs office and internet apps excellently on 4 Gb RAM and old dualcore desktop/notebook processors (sandy, ivy bridge, haswell). I use Pop OS on a Macbook Air 2012, 4 Gb and low voltage dualcore processor just fine since years. For weaker hardware there is still a viable use case as home server with a web ui.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Yes for sure and I think this video would be an example of that lol. Thanks for sharing your experiences as well

[@misterkite]

The smallest Linux I ever used was JAILBAIT, which was made for the iOpener's 16 megabyte flashdisk. Complete with gui and web browser. It was based on LEM (Linux Embedded), which was even smaller at 8 megabytes for the full distro.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Awesome! Yeah, there are quite a few distros out there I'll have to check into.

[@kriskoontz800]

The I-opener! I'd forgotten all about hacking that device to run then current 9x Microsoft systems (slowly on the Cyrix 166mhz proc) back in the day instead of the stock QNX.

[@harveybc]

I love that desktop. That information in the upper left would be really handy. I really like this approach with respect to user level. Too many of the videos I watch start off on a power user level and scare people off trying Linux. I'm not close to being a beginner, meaning I know enough to know how much I haven't learned. It is neat on seeing this old hardware being used. More memory would certainly help, specially with KZbin. Just watching this video is using 329 MB of memory! My system shows the KZbin home page using 251 MB Virtual desktops, (work spaces), is very useful assuming your system has enough resources to take advantage of it. The first time I saw them was in the late 90's on the Gnome desktop. M$ didn't introduce them until I believe Win 10.

[@TheRetroRecall]

I appreciate that. I wanted to approach the video from that perspective because I feel it's more genuine.

[@wcarlin]

Pretty cool. I've got a dual P3 1Ghz and a P4 HyperThread that I'd like to try this on.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Let me know how you make out. The dual p3 would be a neat test.

[@matthewstott3493]

It most assuredly will work. I did that with a PC that had an extra NIC and I booted it from a floppy. Long before one could buy a cheap router, they didn't exist. Not until Wi-Fi became ubiquitous. All it did was run on a RAM disk, stand up a firewall with NAT routing. It also ran a print server, local DNS, and DHCP. You can do all that with Linux because you can strip it down to the absolute bare essentials.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Well I can report that a friend attempted this install on two machines - a P2 and p3 and he is unable to get them working after days and days of attempting to do so. He is a Linux user unlike myself with years of Unix experience. Just want to call out that there was definite doubt in my mind and was pleasantly surprised it worked :)

[@BG101UK]

I was one of the early testers of DSL2024. Nice to see it's coming along well. I did use the original 50MB DSL to sort out a few configuration issues with a Puppy Linux install; Puppy wouldn't let go of the swap partition. Only 64MB of RAM on that system, though.

[@TheRetroRecall]

That's awesome!!! Do you still do testing for them?

[@lauram5905]

I finally bailed on Windows after the most recent spate of corporate decisions, and I found myself also finally taking to Linux for real as a daily driver. I'd suggest giving Atomic distros a try as well if you're exploring. They're very much in the spirit of "set it and forget it", once you have your workspace set up how you like, the only thing that really changes your system is major updates, which are "committed" for easy roll-backs in the case of a bug. It's a little difficult to unlearn some old power-user behaviours, but now I tend to prefer something I can rely on rather than something I can tinker with.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Yeah I hear ya, Windows today is definitely motivating people to look at other options.

[@toby9999]

What does "daily driver" mean?

[@toby9999]

​@@TheRetroRecall​ Not me, though. I've just upgraded to Windows 11, and I'm quite impressed. Linux, by contrast, has given me nothing but trouble whenever I've needed to use it (for work) or when I've tried to dabble with it at home. I'll be leaving well alone. Additionally, the tools I use on Windows have no acceptable Linux equivalent. I'm basically locked into Windows.

[@TheRetroRecall]

A computer you would use everyday as your main system.

[@TheRetroRecall]

True there is a layer of complexity with Linux.

[@basacis]

It's a cool disto. It doesn't do much but it's fun to play around with.

[@TheRetroRecall]

For sure. I was shocked it even worked.

[@ihateemael]

If I recall correctly there were two versions, 1 for older legacy hardware, 1 for the newer hardware of the time. The 50mb size was to fit on a 50mb business card size cd. It was always meant as a rescue OS not as an installed system. You could always rejig it for current hw to make it useful again?

[@TheRetroRecall]

I'm sure there is a way, but something just screams retro gaming on this P3 haha!

[@ihateemael]

@@TheRetroRecall There were "remastering" scripts released . . sorry can't remember by whom. Soon after the success of DSL several others followed with a mini complete OS on cd. I used Ipcop a complete and hackproof firewall distro on cd, there was Moonwall and others . . now I remember . . A seriously beautiful distro called Dreamlinux came out complete with builtin scripts to customise and remaster it. That would be a good place to start. cheers.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Thank you!

[@ipponyc]

I've heard of DSL, but never seen up close like this. Thanks !! So, DSL uses the Antix platform ??

[@TheRetroRecall]

It seems so! And no problem, it was a good experience.

[@canthearu4876]

Yeah, unfortunately, hardware moves on, and the software that runs the modern web just isn't designed to run on such an old and slow processor. While the web sites don't look a lot more complicated these days, a lot more scripting runs in the background, and web browsers are designed to run this efficiently on modern processors by performing lots of upfront code recompilation and optimisation as pages are loading. You don't really notice this on a newer processor, but it kills older processors. Don't forget modern processors would be somewhere between 10-20 times the single threaded performance of this P-III, without taking into account the extra threads on modern processors.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Yes for sure. I think it was definitely the cpu in this case.

[@MultiQuad]

​@@TheRetroRecall If you really, REALLY want to make something that old internet-capable again, you should look into Browservice thing. It's kinda cheating, but can virtually revive anything up (or rather down) to Windows 3.1

[@remoschramm]

nice to see you stumbling around new territory, keep going but you mentioned "retro gaming" at the end, so maybe things like "retroarch" or "batocera" maybe interesting both are linux distros which are configured to be real retro gaming emulation stations (but they need a bit newer hardware) as an OS for older systems like this P3 you could take a look at kolibri os, which is a whole os on one 1,44mb floppy

[@TheRetroRecall]

Appreciate it! Yeah, I'm definitely stumbling but it's an honest stumble, there's so much to learn. Yeah, I think I was referencing keeping this old hardware for retro gaming and leave the newer stuff for learning the Linux distros. Either way, the fact it ran on this system was impressive.

[@elephantrange]

The early DSL' versions had a Debian/Knoppix skeleton, and, like Puppy,, aimed to make old hardware usable. DSL, though, always required a level of command line familiarity..Thus, its emphasis on things like 'term apps': In this case, games that are limited to the ASCII character set in a console. DSL wasn't meant to be comfortable. Its nemesis Puppy was, though. DSL''s method of cutting memory overhead was to load up on tiny programs with minimal background processes, even if they required command-line skills. Puppy did a bit of that too, but its main cut to overhead was by operating as root by default, which made for a more friendly boot process, simplified things for the user, and, yes, saved RAM, but was also risky connected to the web. Long story short, this DSL is AntiX-based, which is MEPIS-based (basically the old name for MX-Linux), which is Debian-based. DSL has always been about customization over comfort. If you do get comfortable with DSL, though, you will likely want to try Arch after a while.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Thanks for this info and perspective! I'm only starting to get into Linux and this one certainly seemed to be a bit more challenging as to your point was stripped down, had more CLI requirements and term apps.

[@mikaelrask]

a small tip meaby write a post on there forum that they could add a small screen during reboot to please remove the installation media and hit enter. other then that a good video.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Yeah, for sure. I mean, if you didn't know about computers you would jump into an installation loop.

[@christopherdecker3830]

How about installing a PCI USB 2.0 card and external USB hub; see if DSL 2024 can handle a relatively modern printer, wifi, Bluetooth, etc. A PCI gigabit Ethernet card will speed up the browsing somewhat but only in a relative sense; if you have a good PCI graphics card, it will be better than the integrated graphics 😀. Would love to see a video on DSL 2024 device compatibility on the Pentium 3.

[@TheRetroRecall]

I think the major limitation is the cpu in this case. It may run - which is amazing by itself.. However I don't think it is good enough to use daily in older tech. Maybe a P4 or core 2 Duo may be a bit more balanced for it.

[@The_Magic_of_Zelda]

I love seeing the old P3 Dell again. Dell made some good machines in my experience in 90s and the 2000s. I used to use Puppy Linux on an old Pentium 4 Dell Inspiron 8500 laptop. Ran great considering the age of the laptop.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Nice! Yes, I lived the Dell's from this era.

[@The_Magic_of_Zelda]

@@TheRetroRecall Dell desktops were everywhere in the 2000s. I had a Dimension 2400 and later a XPS 410. Both were great machines.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Take a look at my most recent video just release 😅

[@The_Magic_of_Zelda]

@@TheRetroRecall I will tonight when I get home.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Awesome!

[@lyokoboy0]

Wow. What a throwback. I remember dell being a big deal. Used to scavenge old 486 and peniuum machines but they were very underpowrred. I found this system stripped, and through scavenging and trading parts had brought it back up with a pentium 2. Such an iconic looking tower, i just havent been as interested in dell hardware since then. Ran windows 2003 as afile server and bbs. Knoppix worked really well too. Hadthis thing runnint till i could finally scavenge a dell dimension desktop with a brand new pentium 4 but bad motherboardcapacitors from the school. I should try dsl out on a old p4 system, perhaps web video player perfornance will be beter dual to the hyperthreading and more ghz speed.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Agreed, I think a P4 would fair much better than this P3 did.

[@jamesdavies686]

10/100 NIC isn't your problem. My 2021 TV still has a 10/100 NIC and it runs youtube and other apps at 4k no problem. Your issue is that CPU is missing tons of modern and critical instruction sets needed for modern browsing.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Yes you are correct.

[@PiercedJedi]

man this brings me back, when downloading a CD image took longer than installing the OS on said CD :) I recently found a pretty good AGP video card for my XPS system, but the caps are blown and I need to fix it, the price was good even with the needed repair... Edit: on your question on if I would use this distro? probably not, I use retro hardware to use retro OS's that I used back in the day and to play the games that require those OS's.... so the machine you used in this video would either have Windows 98 or 2000 (maybe XP).

[@TheRetroRecall]

Yeah makes total sense!

[@lucaciptr]

super for low end hardware and new exploration

[@TheRetroRecall]

100%

[@sorengeti69]

I really liked to watch your video! Greetings from Germany

[@TheRetroRecall]

Thank you! Hello from Canada!

[@MarkTheMorose]

One of Linux's strengths (and, indeed, one of its weaknesses) is that there are so many distros; usually there is a distro for almost any use case. Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Zorin and others are for general desktop use. DSL's raison d'etre is to run modern Linux on older hardware, but it can't work miracles; it also isn't designed to hold the user's hand like the distros mentioned before. A Pentium 3 is now, very outdated - it was discontinued in 2004. It is 32-bit and single-core, and is a poor fit for running modern applications like web browsers with any speed or grace. It would be much worse if you tried installing Windows 10/11 on that P3! As you are a Linux beginner, I'd suggest trying other mainstream distros on the same system that you did for Linux Mint. Spend some time with them, install extra software, get a little more familiar with using Linux in general. Then you can try something a little more challenging, like DSL or Antix, on which DSL is now based. But bravo for trying Linux!

[@TheRetroRecall]

Appreciate this feedback and perspective! Thank you and will do. It's fun exploring the different distros.

[@rick-lj9pc]

I remember when Linux first came out- it required a 386, I never tried it on one but I did have a 66Mhz 486 in the 90es that I dual booted DOS/Windows 3.1 and Linux. It was quite usable at the time with 8MB of RAM. It supported ethernet networking just fine with a 3 com 10MBps ethernet card. I used it as an X terminal to connect to our lab's RS6000s so I could do dev work from my room instead of coming into the lab. Of course the web was just starting then so web browsers and web sites were far more limited. So I am not shocked that a modern distro would work on a P3. Now if you want a challenge dig up a 386 with 1MB of ram and see what that can do!

[@TheRetroRecall]

Haha! Well I think this distros limit is a 486 with 8mb of memory. What distro would you use on a 386?

[@kathrynradonich3982]

Didnt know DSL was back. Been using TinyCore on my older computers. Oldest being a ThinkPad 770 with a linksys usb wifi adapter. Surprising how well it works considering its a 200mhz Pentium MMX with 256mb ram as long as you keep your expectactions in check. Might have to give this a try just for laughs.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Agreed and I'll have to try out TinyCore! Thanks!

[@Deadsayer]

That machine is probably too old to boot from USB, but the PLOP boot manager should be able to make that possible. I'm going to try that on my K6.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Let me know how you make out.

[@Deadsayer]

@@TheRetroRecall Plop Boot Manager works great. I just burned a CD and it booted that instantly. Gives you a menu of all the possible things to boot from. It booted up the grub menu for GPARTED without a problem. Unfortunately, the kernel in GPARTED wasn't compatible with the K6 CPU, so that's as far as I got with that.

[@linuxuser145]

antix or dsl is a good light weight linux distro and it will get you going on old hardware for like office and old gaming but not maybe for new users but still good its based on antix but i never did like the desktop style that much for old computers i use Q4os it really good for old computers and looks much like windows 2000 and xp for people that are new to linux and it's still based on debian for that computer it would be good with Trinity desktop you might like it

[@TheRetroRecall]

Thanks for the info, I will check it out.

[@RandomYouTuber52602]

Nice video. 2 Questions. How do you get computers from E-Waste? Is there gonna be a video on the Sun Microsystems Computer?

[@TheRetroRecall]

I think I had answered your ewaste question, however in short - I have some great connections who support the channel and help out. As for the SUN, it is on the list. The funny thing is that I have two of them to show, so I will be addressing them when I learn a bit more about them :)

[@maxinvisible]

Making friends with an old PC and Linux is a very interesting experience!

[@TheRetroRecall]

:)

[@wjckc79]

I remember when this would have been considered fully featured.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Hahah good point.

[@marksmith9566]

Talk to Action Retro guy to get recommendations for small Linux distros. Would like to see Chrome on this too.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Thanks for the suggestion.

[@MindCaged]

I actually think I might have a very similar or the same model computer sitting under my desk collecting dust. The case at least looks identical and It has a 933 Mhz P3 though it came with Win Me instead of 2000 and I can't remember how much RAM it has, I remember the HDD was only 20 GB. It was my very first new(not garage sale) computer when I first got it, so there's sentimental value. Though I realize it'd probably have next to no chance of browsing youtube now-a--days even with the leanest installation of linux in the world. Heck I've got a cheap laptop from about 5 years ago that struggles to browse and play youtube and on paper it's got up to more than 2-4 times the cpu power as this machine and way more/faster RAM.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Yup, this is a p3 933! Nice system and runs windows 2k and ME just fine. This Linux distro was fun, but it wouldn't be my daily.

[@gregmcmahon957]

Very helpful video.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Awesome! Glad you enjoyed.

[@MajenkoTechnologies]

Damnit! Why didn't you tell me about this yesterday?! I'm gonna have to try this on the Toshiba laptop now to see if it'll work!

[@TheRetroRecall]

Haha! I told you it was a surprise! Looking forward to seeing you do this on stream!

[@RussellFlowers]

Term Apps = stuff to run in your terminal. Links 2 is a text-based web browser, apparently. (Lynx, Links... Links 2?)

[@TheRetroRecall]

Appreciate it!

[@johnstancliff7328]

as long as there is enough memory and the processor supports Linux, it should work with no problem..... the biggest problem is the X86/X64 issue....

[@TheRetroRecall]

Yes. As we see it worked, however I think after getting the feedback from the community the CPU may be throttling the web browsing. It's a cool project though

[@justthisguyyouknow666]

I'm trying to figure out the difference between a labour of love and a passion project.

[@wjckc79]

Actually if you just look up "difference between a labour of love and a passion project" you'll get your answer.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Lol

[@TheRetroRecall]

I guess I would have to understand the context of the question. Everything I do on the channel I find enjoyable / fun and this retro stuff is definitely passion.

[@pianokeyjoe]

LOL! MX/ANTIX LINUX!! I love and use these distros in most of my systems. DSL was different from this back in the day but I can say Antix and MX both are very friendly and stable so I am glad they made a DSL version. I mean.. as long as they left the live snapshot MX tool to respin a snapshot of the running system, it is a viable option for even lower spec hardwarethat you can make custom isos of to then have a "recovery disk" for all those older systems but instead of WINDOWS it would be LINUX yay!

[@TheRetroRecall]

Haha thanks for sharing this. I don't think it's my favorite distro but it was fun to experience.

[@iiisaac1312]

6:50 Connman is a lighter, modular, and faster alternative to NetworkManager. NetworkManager is the standard among distros because of Red Hat's influence (which sometimes results in lots of drama). This has resulted in protest distros that ditch some of Red Hat's software for alternatives, like dumping Systemd for Runit or OpenRC. It's a "community vs corporate" kind of thing. This version of DSL is based off of Antix, which does some of these exchanges, so you might consider them a protest distro. Among protest distros though, Antix is way more obscure than something like Artix or Devuan.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Appreciate the insight. I know very little about these and it's great to have this info! Thanks!

[@FubarMike]

I played around with dsl 2024 for a bit in a VM but couldn't figure out how to change the wallpaper lol

[@TheRetroRecall]

Hahha I didn't find it intuitive at first, bit it became a little easier to navigate.

[@adamward3100]

I use Damn small linux on an older Acer Aspire that was designed for Vista and crashes all the time ... with DSL it does not and it is debian based so exptremely stable. That Dell if it has 64mb or 128 will have hiccups but 256 you will enjoy the experience

[@TheRetroRecall]

It was definitely and interesting OS.

[@ShieyV2komputroniks]

this video made me interested to install it on a athlon xp and a 6800gt , with 1,5gb ram , im sure itll be more a blast!

[@TheRetroRecall]

Hahha good luck and most of all have fun!

[@nalinux]

IIRC, it used to be small enough to be burned on a cdrom of the size of the credit card. It was useful in the begin of 2000's :) Strangely, this 2024 can't boot on my K6-2 550, kernel error or other stuff. BTW : "Coming from a PC user" : computers running Mac, Linux, Haiku, BSD and other are also PC :) PC doesn't mean "Windows". It has never been.

[@TheRetroRecall]

I suppose that's an accurate correction. Next time I will endeavour to reference Windows user VS PC.

[@mymy4110]

Thanks!

[@TheRetroRecall]

No problem!

[@jjohnson71958]

love the legacy dell dimension desktop pc period

[@remoschramm]

i'm in love with this case, but here in germany it's nearly unoptainium

[@TheRetroRecall]

Absolutely. I was lucky when this one came to light in my searches.

[@TheRetroRecall]

I've heard that. I'm even having difficulty finding these types of systems now.

[@EinPinguin]

Wait isn’t dsl still in use in the us? What are you using over there? Here in Germany dsl is still standard and with vdsl even up to 250mbi/s

[@TheRetroRecall]

Haha we still have Dial up, DSL but in areas that are more rural. Mainstream is Cable, Fiber and Satellite.

[@jwoody8815]

Checking this one out, wana see how well it works in PCem on a moderate classic configuration, like an AMD K6-2+ or something along those line, downloading it now. UPDATED: Currently Installing it on a Celeron 533 (The Super Socket 7 setup wouldnt boot DSL for some reason, that and it wasnt Y2K.), 512MB RAM, S3 Virge, Soundblaster 16 and a 10GB IDE HDD.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Interesting. Let me know how you make out.. Tweak the hardware config?

[@johnbergman955]

32-bit Linux distros are becoming more and more niche. The kernel dropped 486 support fairly recently and I heard rumors that they might winding down the 586 (aka Pentium) support soon. I feel like a Pentium 2 is the BARE minimum to be able to boot the kernel today but that won't be very comfortable. I also wonder how accurate that RAM measurement in the system monitor is. Does it count caching? If so, it might be using even less RAM (!) than you thought.

[@johnbergman955]

Of course, Pentium 2 and above count as i686, if I recall.

[@Winnetou17]

Wait, they dropped 486 support already ? I though that they just talked about it (especially the need to emulate floating points on 486's without the FP coprocessor, by not supporting 486 they can simply remove that code, as that was the only CPU that needed it) but didn't yet do it.

[@johnbergman955]

@@Winnetou17 Hm. I think I might've fell for some clickbait a year or two ago. Linus was TALKING about eliminating support but it looks like it's still there as a kernel configuration option. I can't imagine it being any pleasant to run. Somehow I doubt it even gets tested. My mistake.

[@Winnetou17]

@@johnbergman955 No problem. Eventually they will remove it, as I don't think that a 486 can benefit anymore from new kernel improvements. And for online availability, it is just so painfully slow. Some years ago a guy here on YT installed the latest Gentoo (which brings stuff very quickly, the kernel versions are usually like 1-2 days later) at that time, 2018 or 2019, cannot remember, on a 486, with 32 MB of RAM. It worked, but, man was it slow. Not sure how optimized it was, there's a chance that it could've been more optimized and/or stripped out. Though certainly it was quite minimal, as it had to run in that 32 MB of RAM. And it had no GUI.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Good point, I am not totally sure without a reference point.

[@crgintx]

Try Puppy Linux! Also with any of those P3 machines, try to find the fastest CPU supported by your motherboard and max the RAM. Back to the OS: TahrPop, then Xenail and Bionic Beaver Pup are probably the latest kernels that will work properly in your machine. A compact flash drive will likely be your best/fastest option to run your OS from. When you setup your CF drive, you should also create a swap file/ aka virtual memory of about twice your available RAM ie 512mb of RAM = 1gb of swap file. You can't stream KZbin but you can use a KZbin downloader program to download and then watch YT videos without buffering issues.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Thanks for this great info! Quite a bit of people have been suggesting Puppy Linux, I'll have to give it a try.

[@nemanja8946]

TermApps ===> Applications that runs in terminal

[@TheRetroRecall]

Thanks - I had discovered that after haha.

[@uncrunch398]

I wonder if the CPU and CDROM drive trade blows on being the bottleneck. I've seen that on somewhat faster computers.

[@TheRetroRecall]

I think the CPU is definitely the bottleneck but I will say I was quite impressed with it even working on this P3!

[@KingKrouch]

First time I remember hearing about Damn Small Linux and Linux in general was when I was around 9 or 10 and got a modded original Xbox on the second hand market. Never got around to fully trying it beyond seeing a command line as I didn't have an adapter to use a USB device on the Xbox's controller ports.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Yes, I guess this was around for a while and they decided to update it.

[@spywarefinder]

Ahhh! That’s the same Dell tower I want! Super cool! :D the good xtra performance systems!

[@TheRetroRecall]

Absolutely! I had Win2k installed on it in another video and it was quite snappy!

[@spywarefinder]

@@TheRetroRecall I got a Dell Latitude D500 recently, got Windows 98SE at first but had issues finding chipset and video drivers that would be compatible, so I’ve gone to Windows XP but I’m really tempted to dual boot Win2k :D

[@TheRetroRecall]

Ohhh that would be fun! I love both xp and 2k!

[@remixedcat]

@@spywarefinder dell latitude E6430 here is my oldest latitude and I got an inspiron E1505 and 6000 and those are my old dells

[@spywarefinder]

@@remixedcat Just looked up the part numbers, the E6430 and the E1505 are Dell laptops I’d love to obtain I have used those two models before, the mouse buttons on the E1505 have such a satisfying click! Very nice :D

[@TerrorSyxke]

This was the first Linux distro I ever used, it was on a site that was emulating x86 in a browser, v86, so seeing how slow windows 10 ran on my LGA 1155 optiplex I installed Ubuntu on it, and it's been Linux ever since, until I got my current gaming PC and got windows 10 on it (had 11 but it's a terrible os)

[@TheRetroRecall]

Nice! The more I experience linux, the more my interests are peaked.

[@whtiequillBj]

DSL is too big! I wanted to put it onto a 512 MB drive and it doesn't fit.😛 actually after formatting it isn't quite 512 anymore its closer to 491MB Links is a text based web browser for the console. I had to look it up myself, Zathura is a "light weight" PDF viewer. I may look into it. does anyone know if its better the muPDF?

[@TheRetroRecall]

Hahah thanks for sharing this. The community is great and will doubt answer your question!

[@patricktrakzel9657]

You can try other small distros of Linux/GNU, like Puppy Linux or Peppermint on this machine. They are a bit more 'complete´, so to say., but still small. Look at some videos of small distros, so you can see what is more to your experience/liking. See you soon!

[@TheRetroRecall]

Appreciate it!!

[@Gaspode-uj8jt]

Unix paths, and therefore Linux, use "slash" i.e. "/". MS Windows uses "back slash" i.e. "\". Unix predates MS Windows so the Unix terminology is correct.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Appreciate the info! So much to learn :)

[@johanb.7869]

If a program won't close by clicking on the X or close, app killer will kill it. Same as xkill. I use MX Linux which has the same installer.

[@TheRetroRecall]

It was neat to see it in action.

[@LeeMaiden]

It won't install on a Chromebook because the ISO is not burnable with UEFI, even Ventoy couldn't get it because it doesn't have or make an efi partition. I sure wanted it on my Chromebook, but even doing an image transfer couldn't get it, so my Chromebook still runs Linux Mint 22, and very little room to play with on it's 16GB eMMC.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Good to know. I never liked the netbook / chrome book form factors.

[@sdgx0]

if i had to watch youtube videos i can just copy/paste link and throw it into vlc player or mediaplayer classic

[@TheRetroRecall]

True.

[@Ben333bacc]

"Term Apps" means terminal apps. Lynx is a text based web browser. It is like the DOS of Linux, if that makes sense. Console, TTY... non GUI.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Appreciate it!!! Thank you!

[@pierreinthavong181]

Awesome video!😊

[@TheRetroRecall]

Thank you!

[@KrK-EST]

Term is short for Terminal

[@TheRetroRecall]

Thank you, I felt like a goof after when I found out.. But that's how we learn.

[@marksmith9566]

Is there a stripped down Ubuntu you could try?

[@TheRetroRecall]

They have Lubuntu which I could try, just not sure if a P3 would support it like this distro.

[@hypocriticalharambe8274]

Then you have people like me who use puppy linux on some of his hardware because its got JWM / fluxbox I have used that desktop forever its also not really a beginners distro set there also mostly sub 700mb and some have full apt support and wayland now a days. Oh and puppy linux runs everything as root so you learn fast what not to mess with.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Good to know!

[@thomassmith4999]

Does anyone remember just how fast period correct Linux is on a Pentium 3. I'll stick to using old OS's on old machines

[@TheRetroRecall]

Yes agreed... However it was neat that to see it running!

[@davidsteinberg9523]

I tried DSL probably around 20 years ago, so my xp is definitely not current. I'd be curious whether the install could be tweeked to run better on that machine. For a distro that says it'll run on a 486, I'm skeptical based on your results, unless it autotunes based on the cpu.

[@TheRetroRecall]

I think there are installation options or it tweaks itself according to the cpu as you noted. I'd have to look into it more of course. The system itself was good, the browsing experience left a lot to be desired.

[@Winnetou17]

Technically Linux itself supports 486 and up. It used to support 386 too (that's what it started on) but that got dropped several years ago. If you tweak it enough, any Linux distro should run on 486, but it would be very slow indeed. In 2018 or 2019 somebody here on KZbin installed the latest version of Gentoo (the distro which I use too :D) on a 486 with 32 MB of RAM. It ran, it could connect to the internet, but, maan, it was slow. And it was on terminal only, no graphical interface. The guy demoed it playing an mp3 song (you'll never guess which one), connecting to the computer from another one via ssh (and during the mp3 play, it started to stutter, as the single core 133 MHz CPU was not up to the task, lol) and a few other things. It booted in 11 minutes if I remember correctly. And shutdown in 5 minutes. So ... yeah, 486 support at this time is mostly just showing it can work. Though I guess you can setup it just to do some very basic stuff. Or if you happen to need to connect to the internet and download some file for which you know the exact url. Oh, I guess that maybe lynx or links2 should work, I don't remember if he tried that. But otherwise I'd say that it would be better to not be connected to the Internet.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Thanks for all of this info! I'm learning quite a bit from. These comments.

[@spuds7677]

Years ago when DSL was 50ish megs, I had a friend of mine make a PC recovery CD using DSL. He had all sorts of software on it we could use. It got us out of some jams but, when the Ultimate Boot CD came out, we used it instead.

[@TheRetroRecall]

That's pretty cool. Ultimate Boot CD, haven't heard of that in a while :)

[@justsumguy2u]

DSL is a novel idea, but it wouldn't suit my needs---being able to use video formats like KZbin is a must for me. I do think you should've installed the extra files in this video, as they might add functionality and make this o/s more usable on the internet

[@BilisNegra]

Compatibility with more video formats could make KZbin videos load at least... But modern KZbin on a PIII equals slideshow. There's nearly no way around that. Maybe getting one of the best AGP graphics cards of old would improve the experience, but then we're talking pricey vintage hardware. Pedestrian gear from the era that you'd find for very cheap will not do the trick.

[@justsumguy2u]

@@BilisNegra I have one of those cards (a GeForce 9000 series). It's one of the last cards to work with Win98, but I doubt DSL or Nvidea would have driver support for Linux

[@gentuxable]

​@@justsumguy2u Should work with the "nouveau" open source driver according to the documentation at freedesktop.

[@TheRetroRecall]

I agree, however I do not hi k it would correct the browsing issue based on feedback from others. Although it runs (which is a miracle in itself) - it is limited by the hardware.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Yes I agree. Files or not we would be limited.

[@usernotfound-h2v]

Heh,if you'd try to install any modern browser on Windows on a Pentium 3 or Athlon XP it would tell you SSE2 instructions are required to surf the web now. I guess they lied.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Very possible. It was quite slow, however I think the 10/100 card was probably the issue.

[@ianab]

To surf the web well/normally, then you will want that sort of cpu. A p3 is going to limp no matter what OS you use.

[@ianab]

​@@TheRetroRecallI don't think so. I can do web based stuff on a crappy 10 mbit wifi just fine. But that's with an i5 based machine

[@usernotfound-h2v]

@@ianab Eh,the Pentium 4 has those instructions and it sucks on the web aswell. Minimum i'd say you need an lga 775 dual core to browse the web without pulling your hair out. Still it's impressive Linux can still do something with 25 year old hardware

[@Winnetou17]

@@TheRetroRecall The 10/100 MB card totally isn't the issue. Wikipedia and google should literally load in less than 1 second if the network card would've been the bottleneck. And you'd be able to watch 1080p KZbin videos (technically even 4K, as that needs about 30 Mbit connections, and up, depending on the quality) The CPU is just too slow for the modern applications and the modern web. Which both are much more bloated. Well, debateable to which level, as they also have more features, compatibility and are more stable.

[@toma.3d]

If you do want a fully functional and very lite distro, give Porteus a try, there are versions for all kinds of PC and maintained properly. Go for the Mate edition and whatever architecture you need, it is the same as Linux Mint as far as use is concerned.

[@TheRetroRecall]

Appreciate the info!!! I'll add it to the list.

[@toma.3d]

@@TheRetroRecall you are welcomed, always.

[@Pulverrostmannen]

I have a Toshiba Lapline T3100E 286 12mhz and 3MB ram and one Zenith Z-180 (ZFL-181-93) Intel 80c88 4,7Mhz or 8Mhz turbo with 640Kb of ram and this Linux distro is just "too damn large" for them!

[@TheRetroRecall]

Lmao, I would guess so! Nice systems!! :)

[@SinaFarhat]

nice!

[@TheRetroRecall]

Thanks!

[@Dragon_Slayer_Ornstein]

a 100mbit network is fast enough, it's more like modern web browsers want ~2GB not to be slow is the main problem. Web browsers are massively bloated, I miss the days where browsers would use 50mb of ram, not sure why they use multiple gigabytes these days.

[@TheRetroRecall]

For sure, I had realized that after.

[@cliffordreynolds1835]

DSL was painful for broadband. Im so glad we have fibre now. 3Gbps down/upload for the win!

[@TheRetroRecall]

Nice!!!!

[@johnblue1313]

You are expecting too much from your pc. DSL allows you to work in text mode with your pc. Not for games lol

[@TheRetroRecall]

Always have to expect the most especially when it's marketed to run on older systems.

[@stan.rarick8556]

Will LibreOffice or similar work?

[@Winnetou17]

From what I see they no longer provide version for 32 bit Linux (but curiously they do for Windows). I don't know if the current versions can be manually compiled for 32 bit, I think it should, but I'm not sure, and I'm too lazy to try it manually Checking their archive, the last of the 6.x version also doesn't have deb or rpm 32 bit, buut, I can see that version 6.1.6.3 (last of 6.1 branch) does have. Too lazy to check the inbetween versions. This is from 2019, so quite old, but not terribly so, given how, for basic usage, most things were there already even 10 years ago. Less compatibility with MS Office for sure. Now, another thing is that it would probably be quite slow. I've heard that LibreOffice is quite bloated. But I can't tell, my laptop is quite old, but not THAT old.

[@TheRetroRecall]

I see that someone commented already. I was going to suggest getting an older distro and trying it.