GolfNovemberUniform

I need some help finding a distro for a very old machine.

It's my family's old desktop with 2001 components (bought in 2004) and a Pentium CPU that is NOT i686. I checked the exact model and architecture once but I don't remember it now. The only thing I remember is that it's not i686 so 99% of modern 32 bit distros don't work on it (stuck right after grub).

The machine has 1 Gb of DDR1 RAM though so I think it may be useful or at least fun to play around with.

Now it's on Windows XP that runs quite well but doesn't support modern SSL certificates so it can't browse the internet (idk how to fix it ok?).

A long time ago I tried to run multiple distros in live mode on it and got only one (Puppy) to work. Display, sound, ethernet and pretty much everything worked fine. GPU seemed to be an issue though because NVidia and I couldn't install the driver (it was skill issue and I think it's possible to do). But now it doesn't work for some reason.

Are there any Linux distros or other operating systems (preferably not deprecated) that I can install on it? And btw it does have bootable USB support.

EDIT: There are way too many answers and a lot of ones that don't mind the architecture limitations. I'm grateful to everyone who replied but I have to close this discussion now and I will not reply to further answers. I have received enough information and I cannot physically read so many replies.

I think this way of implementing and using AI is actually good from all perspectives (probably except some legal aspects but I don't think Mozilla will add a legally grey feature). What do you think about it?

And I'm sorry if it's already posted here. I didn't find any posts on this topic myself

What do you think of this project and cloud gaming in general? I thought it's dead already

I am in need of a separate degoogled phone for some things that require high level of privacy (nothing illegal).

I have 2 phones that I can use. One of them is my business phone (it has my business number, apps, data and that sort of stuff) which is now running an OS with all the Google spyware because it's necessary for the apps to work. I can reinstall everything on the second phone and use the first one as the secure device since it supports everything I need. The problem is that it has some issues on vanilla ROMs that I don't really want to deal with and the reinstalling will take a lot of time.

The issue with the second phone is that it is rocking an old MTK chip and rooting instructions are let's say a bit beyond my ability to understand. I still want to use it without Google if possible though. So can I degoogle its stock ROM with ADB or something? And is it worth trying or there will still be some vulnerabilities?

EDIT: to clear some possible misunderstandings, the reason of why I need a separate secure phone is that I am forced to use a very invasive proprietary app that I'd prefer just keeping on a separate device instead of trying to limit its spyware abilities with firewalls and that kind of stuff. I don't trust the last solution much. Also I can't use it in a VM because I need it to always be accessible wherever I am and yk carrying a PC is not an option

When the xz backdoor was discovered, I quickly uninstalled my Arch based setup with an infected version of the software and switched to a distro that shipped an older version (5.5 or 5.4 or something). I found an article which said that in 5.6.1-3 the backdoor was "fixed" by just not letting the malware part communicating with the vulnerable ssh related stuff and the actual malware is still there? (I didn't understand 80% of the technical terms and abbreviations in it ok?) Like it still sounds kinda dangerous to me, especially since many experts say that we don't know the other ways this malware can use (except for the ssh supply chain) yet. Is it true? Should I stick with the new distro for now or can I absolutely safely switch back and finally say that I use Arch btw again?

P. S. I do know that nothing is completely safe. Here I'm asking just about xz and libxzlk or whatever the name of that library is

EDIT: 69 upvotes. Nice

Introducing the all-new Debian 12 ESDE (Enhanced Security Desktop Edition) Plasma UI pre-alpha v0.2.1: a Debian desktop setup created for a fiction organization's low-end office computers. It features simplified KDE apps, no blur, generally lightweight system settings (some features are disabled or tuned for higher performance and security) and a custom auto-hide floating panel (on the right) with a large clock and a system monitor overview. Security features are planned and are not added yet. For now the main issue is that it's quite difficult to use scroll bars on full-screen windows because the panel opens every time the mouse cursor touches the right edge of the screen. Would love a solution for this. And it often crashes in certain scenarios so yea it's just a pre-alpha now. Oh and the specs:

Distribution: Debian 12 DE/WM: KDE Plasma 5.27 Theme: Breeze Dark Icons: Papirus (it would be more realistic to use the stock icons but I just hate how folders look there so custom icon pack it is) Apps: Konsole, Dolphin (Qt apps) and Firefox (GTK 3 app)

The Debian logo on the top left just opens a slightly tuned KDE's Application Menu so I didn't show that. Everything else isn't really ready yet. Well, could you expect more from a bad setup?

P.S. The actual purposes of this post are to show the flexibility of KDE and deleted

Even though different Linux distros are often fairly close in terms of real-life performance and all of them have a clear advantage over Windows in many use cases, we can't reject the fact that Arch Linux has undoubtedly won the competition. And now I'm so glad to have another reason to proudly say "I use Arch btw"

::: It was a joke of course :::