[terinjokes]

I just reinstalled Gentoo this past weekend on an IBM ThinkPad with a Pentium 4/M and 256MiB of RAM, and even there it's probably "supported" not "Supported (green checkmark emoji)".

Most of Linux worked, to it's credit, though I needed to tweak libata for some IDE controller quirks presumably lost in the PATA driver transition in 2.6.20. VTs worked fine and KMSCON worked well, once I loaded the radeonfb driver in initrd.

Where it noticibly falls apart is trying to being up X11, as the driver stack in X11 and Mesa have bitrotten (and in Mesa's case, removed, and no one is looking at mesa-amber from what I understand). A lightweight tiling manager and urxvt was enough for it to crash the whole system.

[anthk]

NetBSD has a better bundled X.org for legacy systems; the modular one it's for modern ones.

[terinjokes]

It was my first time installing NetBSD, but it only took a few minutes. Some bits I felt were worded a bit strange, particularly around partitioning. It seemed like one page was using CHS while others used LBA.

In any case, X worked reasonably well; 31 fps in glxgears with llvmpipe. Still a bit too slow for something like alacritty, but at least using herbstluftwm wasn't painful.