[sevensor]

I run Arch on most everything -- up to now it's worked great on old hardware as long as I'm judicious about what I install. When they stop updating 32bit, I suppose I'll switch to Tiny Core. Or rather, well after they stop updating 32bit and Tiny Core catches up.

[morganvachon]

Debian will likely support 32 bit until the heat death of the universe, and Slackware probably will as well. There are also the BSDs; OpenBSD and NetBSD in particular will enjoy a long life on non-x64 hardware.

[sevensor]

That's a good point about the BSDs. I've been meaning to try a BSD for a while -- it sounds like a good fit for my fleet of aging thinkpads.

[morganvachon]

I've had excellent results running OpenBSD on old laptops. I have a Dell Latitude CPx (Pentium III) that is 100% supported and runs very fast (relatively speaking) under that OS. I ran it on a Latitude D400 and D620 as well until I gave those machines away (I'm a bit of a Dell collector if you can't tell), and it works fairly well on an Acer Aspire One netbook I keep for when we go camping and my wife wants to have a machine to write her book reviews.

[weavie]

How well does suspend/resume work? I tried FreeBSD on my old laptop and couldn't get that to work. Its the only thing keeping me from trying again..

[morganvachon]

With OpenBSD, my experience has been generally good. On some laptops it just works by default, on others you have to configure it a bit and it will work fine after that. Here's the relevant man page:

http://man.openbsd.org/apmd

[km3k]

Good point about other distros catching up. Arch will be updating 32-bit until at least November and it could be another year or more until others like Tiny Core or Debian catch up to the package versions that Arch left off with. Will that now 8+ year old hardware still be worth using enough to switch distros when it is 10+ years old?