This problem exists because people, like this author, who are in to vintage systems aren't taking up the mantle to maintain a distribution to support their old systems. It's like they want the benefit with zero effort. Become a leader, start the work and organize a community to take your favorite distribution and make it work on your legacy system.

Linux doesn't need money to make a living, software maintainers do.

> I see no valid reason for it not supporting every computer that can still be useful.

I assume the author is willing to pay all the people who are going to maintain all of those "computers that can still be useful" instead of demanding that they conjure spare time for that out of nowhere.

As much as I share the sentiment of keeping old hardware alive and useful, reality requires a question of "who's going to work on that".

In other words, because it is a community project made by volunteers that earn nothing, there is no valid reason not to demand more unpaid work.

>In a more enlightened society, all products would be supported for as long as they remain useful. The time has come to stop building obsolescence into our computers and make the small effort required to provide user-friendly distributions of Linux that support near-vintage computers.

The only reason this person believes it is a "small effort" is because she has never ever remotely helped doing the effort herself.

I have made such effort myself. I have been part of Linux user groups and helped lots of people. I have experienced myself what is helping enormously someone for only this person demanding more free work and time just because I have already given her free work and time.

We have given talks in the University: If you want to install Linux do research when you buy a computer so it has compatible components because life is much easier and then the same people attending buying incompatible hardware and demanding us to fix it for them, so she could do the classes ' assignments, because that's what we "enjoyed doing".

"Linux developers are suffering from the Microsoft disease. Namely, they seem to be too busy chasing the latest fads"

This is also a ridiculous statement. It has traditionally always been Microsoft that wasn't chasing the latest fads. Microsoft has always been late to any new developments and technologies. Apple and Linux have always been the first in class there.

If you want a well supported operating system on your old computer, install Windows on it. Don't rely on the work of enthousiasts that are just trying to build the best next thing.

I look forward to seeing the author’s low-resource Linux distribution; since they’ve identified that as a small-effort task, I expect it won’t take them long to ship it.

GNU userspace as well as the Linux kernels have not abandoned 32bit x86.

It has Windows 2000 installed and I tried many small Linux distributions. DSL runs fine.

You have to lower your expectations, but you can have a nice little system to play around with. You also won't have a modern browser, but, even if you did, you wouldn't have enough RAM or CPU to use most sites.

My conclusion is that if you want to keep such a machine working, you would have to find some specific job for it to do, such as monitoring, honeypot, playing a specific game, text editing, etc.

Connecting it to the internet would be another matter.

Perhaps the features you want are a byproduct of this "disease" then? If you don't want bloated software you may need to get off the bloated software express train and learn how to use something a little more esoteric.

I'm running Sparkylinux on literally that exact model and vintage of Dell laptop and it works fine. It came with an installer and booted fine off of USB, I'm not sure what the problem is. How many vintage hardware aficionados are there who are also unwilling to learn anything new about computers?

Don't pick the trendy new distribution of the year if you want something usable on old hardware.

If you want a modern web browser then you need a computer made in the last 10 years or so. The statement that "It's just a browser!" is not a good argument. The modern web is very resource intensive so you need a decent computer.

For Slackware, enable ZRAM:

     wget -O /etc/rc.d/rc.zram https://raw.githubusercontent.com/otzy007/enable-zRam-in-Slackware/master/etc/rc.d/rc.zram

     sed -i 's,1024,512,g' /etc/rc.d/rc.zram

     chmod +x /etc/rc.d/rc.zram

     echo '/etc/rc.d/rc.zram start' >> /etc/rc.d/rc.local

You won't need Plasma or XFCE. For sure. Deselect them, as lightweight apps are more than enough. Setup Slackbuild thru sbotools. Then, sboinstall icewm and configure it:

- IceWM. Edit the preferences so the fonts match the GTK3 theme. "fc-list | grep fontname" will help you on that.

- Some matching IceWM and GTK3/2 theme. Metal2 from IceWM matches perfectly the Solaris 8 theme from B00merang, Google/DDG it.

- XFE as the file manager, the colour scheme can be changed with ease so it matches the GTK3 colours.

- "udiskie &" in ~/.icewm/startup.

- "nm-applet &" appended to the same file.

- Seamonkey as the web browser, with UBo Legacy.

- AlienBOB has a Chromium build, and I have a huge envvar for Chromium in order to be run fast on machines with at least 1GB of RAM. It's too large in order to be posted here, but I can post it under a separate self-answer to this post.

- Audacious as the audio player, SMplayer for videos.

- For gaming, Slackware has several Slackbuilds with light games. And Wine with multilib.

- Ted/Gnumeric make an amazing and lightweight alternative to LibreOffice.

However, they don't cater for every situation, every computer that exists. So somebody will be needed to cater for those few cases that aren't covered by mainstream distros.

Now, that somebody has to have good knowledge of Linux and be able to recompile/rewrite whatever is needed for that idiosyncratic distro that works for that particular edge case.

If a few people insist on using an uncommon computer, they have to take on the responsibility of keeping mainstream Gnu Linux working on those particular computers. Or else be satisfied with the older versions of Gnu Linux that were working previously on those computers.

ASIDE: I like making emulators of old 8-bit computers. But I don't try to make those old computers use modern software, they use the CP/M software that was extant at the time those 8-bit computers were made.

Edit: Quite a few other folks in this comment section seem to have pointed out basically the same thing.

Edit: I know exactly what would be the optimal solution and it is two-port SATA drive. Rasberry and the old Laptop would share the same drive. Even I could write necessary routines starting from "scrot". And other I/O like keyboard and touchpad would be equally easy. But no two-port drives in Ebay.

Old devices need retiring, like old cars.

Old windows of that vintage can no longer talk modern SMB but Debian i386 can just fine, so I boot debian on it to transfer data from the internet or other modern machines. LXDE is perfectly usable, although I admit I haven't tried a web browser in some time.

They want somebody to write, test and maintain a distribution that works without bugs and easy enough for newbies, on an almost bottomless pit of historical hardware.

You can have this. It's easy. Just hire a developer or two. Oh, you want it for free too?!

You don't have to argue with the many technical issues in the post, the author doesn't deserve the oxygen.

If running new software is so important just buy a new computer!?

> The statement that "It's just a browser!" is not a good argument. The modern web is very resource intensive so you need a decent computer.

The modern web is resource intensive, but not that resource intensive, unless you insist on keeping a myriad of tabs open and active.

A Linux desktop with half a dozen webapps open in Chrome (and more tabs suspended) can still stay under 3GB RAM used (I'm clocking in at 2.2 right now), so it's still viable on 32 bit hardware.

3GB RAM dualcore notebooks were available 15 years ago, and for the past ten years you could retrofit them with SSDs for reasonably cheap.

Both together are like 150 bucks according to a brief ebay survey, that's a very low bar for "decent".