alt Hacker NewsIn the abstract I'm a big fan of supporting me old machines forever, but I have to ask out of curiosity - what hardware is practical to run these days and only has a 32-bit processor?
Replies
I tried to repurpose an old laptop I had lying around as a "lie on the couch and surf the web or watch youtube" machine. It was one of the last 32-bit only cpus (pentium m), so I installed Debian bookworm (12) on it. Unfortunately it turned out it couldn't even play youtube videos at 144p without stuttering. So I E-wasted the machine.
I suppose as some kind of headless home server it could still have been useful. OTOH for something that runs 24/7 a RPi would use a fraction of the electricity and still be a lot more powerful.
So yes, beyond nostalgia and some embedded/industrial usecases, it's hard to see a use for a 32-bit only PC these days.
In my case I have a couple of first gen 32-bit Atom netbooks that I use regularly for the same things I've always used them for. The hardware still work just fine so I see no reason to replace them.
I have a few old PCs (towers) here which don't support amd64 mostly Pentium 4-based.
They all still have DVD reader drives and are nice for ripping CDs. Despite the fact that the drives are nearing 20 years of age (machines are from ~2005) they still perform better than most “new” external drives. Of course one could also move the drives to a newer machine but many of them use the IDE connector which is not commonly found on modern systems. Also, modern cases typically don't account for (multiple) 5.25" drives.
The other use case is to flash microcontrollers. When fiddeling around with electronics there is always a risk of a short circuit or other error that could in worst case kill the attached PC's mainboard. I feel much safer attaching my self-built electronics to an old machine than to my amd64 workstation.
Due to their age, I think the old machines may not live much longer -- I fear not even 10 more years, some of my old 32-bit laptops have already failed. Hence even for me it does not make sense to try keeping up the software support. Maybe I switch them to a BSD or other Linux distribution if they live long enough but for now the machines run OK with Debian Bookworm (newly oldstable), too.