LeFantome

That is 64 bit. Literally any modern distro should run on it.

Debian will not run on Pentium anymore. It is not performance, it is compiler options. You need a i686 (Pentium Pro). This means none of the Debian derivatives will either.

Adelie, Arch32, and T2 all still run on Pentium though I believe.

[edit: sorry, I saw Pentium 75 from the comment above - Celeron M should be fine]

You would be surprised. If you stay text only and use a 32 bit distro, it would run up to date versions of most CLI programs.

Adelie and Arch32 still support Pentium.

Booting to a GUI, there are still a few options. I think Velox would run on that. I bet Xorg with FVWM would too. You are not going to have much left for apps though. However, you could run a couple of terminals.

Adelie Linux (totally modern Linux distro) lists 64 MB as the minimum server memory requirement.

Do you use any of the other XFCE stuff with Niri? Or just the terminal?

MPV is a much lighter video player. Try that.

I was trying to think of the oldest hardware I have run modern Linux on (probably an old Pentium II) when I remembered that I used to run SLS on a 486 (33 MHz, 4 MB of RAM).

Punch cards. The “true” PC era.

“Stone” tablets? Luxury. Ours were dried mammoth dung.

Are you running Trinity or KDE?

Not sure why I get so much less unless it is that. Or are you saying you run Trinity 64 bit?

I agree that 32 bit is not often going to be 50% less in practice. Sometimes I think we should be running 64 bit kernels with 32 bit userland.

I found my people.

I have Linux on a 2009 and 2012 MacBook Pro and 2013 and 2017 MacBook Airs.

The 2009 is getting a bit sluggish but for regular stuff, they all work great. We even played a Steam game on the 2012 earlier today (not AAA obviously).

All Chimera Linux.

It is because it is 32 bit. You can run a 32 bit distro on your machine too if you really want.

You can get a full Trinity desktop on Q4OS in 130 MB of RAM (32 bit edition).

.NET runs fast on Linux