BM-2cWbH14Eetx5WNKnQdREUSuPqWNkDCedyj
Jul 17 10:49

You could use Raspian ;-), the Raspberry Pi's standard distro. It is a branch of your Debian and is very gentle to resources. Recently, a official PC version called Debian PIXEL OS released: https://opensource.com/article/17/1/try-raspberry-pis-pixel-os-your-pc

BM-2cWbH14Eetx5WNKnQdREUSuPqWNkDCedyj
Jul 17 10:58

And - of course - it supports i386!

[chan] linux
Jul 17 11:00

I guess, for linux in general, it will take an extremely long time, if at all, for the plain i386 support to die away, given how many architectures (even old ones) are supported by the linux kernel currently. However, more distributions might move away from supporting i386, since basically all halfway modern x86 machines are already x86_64, and it's quite a hassle to support both.

[chan3] linux
Jul 18 13:09

Thanks for your answers You have right, for linux in general many old architectures are supported, so I can suppose that i386 will run linux "forever". Maybe some applications will end support 32-bits, but if this happen I try to find alternatives. This is computer for 20 USD :-) so no problem. At the end I give them to the museum.

[chan] linux
Jul 19 16:06

Linux distros should keep supporting (up to 20yo) old hardware because not everyone has the money to buy a recent machine every 5 years and because there are some "recent" (6yo) 32-bit-only CPUs (e. g. Intel Atom). One clear advantage Linux has over Mac/Windows is the support for old machines: try to run a "supported" Windows version on a P4 from 2003 to see what I mean. OK, you won't break any speed records, but it's still faster than on a Raspi. Not to mention all the unsecure crap on recent machines (TPM, "Secure Boot", UEFI and CPU backdoors).