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by morganvachon 3422 days ago
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.
1 comments

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.
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.
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..
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