> Computers have been powerful enough for productivity tasks for 20 years

It baffles me how usable Office 97 still. I was playing with it recently in a VM to see if it worked as well as I remembered, and it was amazing how packed with features it is considering it's nearing on thirty. There's no accounting for taste but I prefer the old Office UI to the ribbon, there's a boatload of formatting options for Word, there's 3D Word Art that hits me right in the nostalgia, Excel 97 is still very powerful and supports pretty much every feature I use regularly. It's obviously snappy on modern hardware, but I think it was snappy even in 1998.

I'm sure people can enumerate here on the newer features that have come in later editions, and I certainly do not want to diminish your experience if you find all the new stuff useful, but I was just remarkably impressed how much cool stuff was in packed into the software.

> There is a herculean effort on the part of package maintainers to build software for distros, and no one has been building 32 bit version of software for years, even if it is possible to build from source. There is only a very limited set of software you can use, even CLI software because so many things are built with 64 bit dependencies

That seems odd? Debian 12 Bullseye (oldstable) has fully supported i386 port. I would expect it to run reasonably well on late 32 bit era systems (Pentium4/AthlonXP)

I was on linux as my main driver in the early 2000s an we did watch movies back then, even DVDs. Of course, the formats where not HD and it was DivX or DVD ISOs. I remember running Gentoo and optimizing build flags for mplayer to get it working, at a time I had a 500Mhz Pentium III, later 850Mhz. And I also remember having to tweak the mplayer output driver params to get a good and smooth playback, but it was possible (mplayer -vo xv for Xvideo support). IIRC I got DVD .iso playback to run even on the framebuffer without X running at all (mplayer -vo fb). Also the "-framedrop" flag came in handy (you can do away with a bit less than 25fps when under load). Also, definitely you would need compile-time support for SSE/SSE2 in the CPU. I am not even sure I ever had a GPU that had video decoding support.

> Eventually I discovered that the problem isn't really the power of the computer.

Nope, that’s a modern problem. That’s what happens when the js-inmates run the asylum. We get shitty bloated software and 8300 copies of a browser running garage applications written by garbage developers.

I can’t wait to see what LLMs do with that being the bulk of their training.

Exciting!

My 32 bit laptop is a Thinkpad T42 from 2005 which has a functioning CDROM, and which can run Slackware15 stable 32bit install OKish, so I haven't tried any of this but:

My first thought: How about using a current computer to run qemu then mounting the Lenny iso as an image and installing to a qemu hard drive? Then dd the hard drive image to your 32bit target. (That might need access to a hard drive caddy depending on how you can boot the 32bit target machine, so a 'hardware regress' I suppose).

My second thought: If target machine is bootable from a more recent live linux, try a debootstrap install of a minimal Lenny with networking (assuming you can connect target machine to a network, I'm guessing with a cable rather than wifi). Reboot and install more software as required.

NetBSD is probably what would make most sense to run on that old hardware.

Alternatively you may have accidently built a great machine for installing FreeDOS to run old DOS games/applications. It does install from USB, but needs BIOS so can't run it on modern PC hardware.

You might have some luck applying isohybrid(1) to the period-correct .iso image, making it bootable by other means: https://manpages.debian.org/stretch/syslinux-utils/isohybrid...

You can always run Linux off the dos partition with vmlinux loader. Or Slackware DOS version (forgot it's name).

Don't lose hope. You can boot it one way or other :)

Ps. On old good days there was not initrd and other ram disk stuff - you read entire system straight from the disk. Slackware 8 was that for sure and NetBSD (even newest one) is still doing it by default

Controversial position: journaling is not as beneficial as commonly believed. I have been using FAT for decades and never encountered much in the way of data corruption. It's probably found in far more embedded devices than PCs these days.

> If the user hits the power switch or the kernel panics while the heads are moving or the FAT is updating, that disk is gone.

Makes sense, great point. I would rather use a second drive for the write disk space, if possible (I know how rare it's now to have two floppy drives, but still).

> If the user hits the power switch or the kernel panics while the heads are moving or the FAT is updating, that disk is gone.

This isn't true, I commented lower in the thread, but FAT keeps a backup table, and you can use that to restore the disk.

MenuetOS/KolibriOS:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38059961

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27249075

That was 1999 and I never saw anything like that afterwards.

Now you have ;-)

I got the same feeling, whey I saw it first time. How they fit GUI, drivers all that stuff in 1.44MB.

xwoaf-rebuild matches that

https://web.archive.org/web/20240901115514/https://pupngo.dk...

Would that even fit the unicode tables today?

Me too, was CoyoteLinux.

Is that name used with an eyebrow raised, or did that particular double entendre not make it out of the UK?

If I recall correctly, when you wanted all of the bells and whistles that Slackware had to offer, it required 72 floppy disks.

The omnipresent coil whine in almost every laptop I got in past 15 years, gives me at least that nostalgic noise that says "computer is working".

Whish coil whine was configurable :)

That is an indication of someone who grew up in the CD-R/RW era.

Before then, a local clone store had an 'insane deal' on floppy disks, and they came with Slackware. I had a Mac, and the floppies weren't very good so.

MuLinux was also a floppy-based “live” distro, with optional floppy disks for X11, programming languages, etc.

12‽ I'd swear the Slackware I downloaded was closer to 30+. On dialup. Via a VAX. Using FTP to go from internet to the VAX box, then Kermit from the VAX to the DOS PC using Procomm Plus. Write it all, start the install sequence, find out that the 18th disk was bad. Reboot. Rinse. Repeat.

X disks were X11. There were also the A,B, C etc disks.

Then there was the Coherent install, with massive manual on ultra thin paper with the shell on the front.

Probably not. Pretty sure it was Puppy Linux (among I'm sure others) that could be run on just two floppies. I used to have this old 933MHz Coppermine system that I took when a medical office was going to throw it out, some time in the early 00s.

The HDD was borked but it had a 3.5" bay that worked, so I got a floppy-based distro running on it. I later replaced the drive and then made the mistake of attempting to compile X11 on it. Results were... mixed.

Someone was still working on some minor cleanups in August 2025: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250825163545.39303-1-andriy.s...

(That mail also mentions the floppy driver is "basically orphaned" though. But evidently it's still there and builds.)

Maybe you're thinking of the floppy tape (ftape) driver, which was removed back in the 2.6.20 kernel. Though there's a project keeping an out-of-tree version of it working with recent kernels at https://github.com/dbrant/ftape

Don't think so? Linux should still support almost all builtin motherboard floppy controllers, for the platforms it still runs on. ISA floppy controller support is probably not as comprehensive, but not because anything has been dropped.

No but I find this line interesting:

The Linux kernel drops i486 support in 6.15 (released May 2025), so 6.14 (released March 2025) is the latest version with full compatibility.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk

It's basically what people used before USB sticks. But it was also the storage medium that software was sold on, before CD-ROMs became widespread.

Floppy is a race of robotic jackalopes, known for their floppy ears. A "Single Floppy" is a rare subset of that species where only one ear flops down due to a random mutation of their hardware.

If you have to ask why this is not for you. Why climb a mountain that’s already been climbed hundreds of times? For the challenge.