I’ve got an older machine that I’d like to give a second life. I’ve always been an Ubuntu fan in the past, but checking their site for a lightweight distri it looks like they’ve gone all 64 bit. Is that right? Can I still get a recent version for a 32-bit processor?
Check out Antix, Debian based, and it’s primarily made for older devices and has a 32bit ISO
AntiX runs great on my late 90s Celeron rig with a 1.2GHz single core socket 370 Celeron with 256MB RAM.
Runs waaaaaay better than Windows XP and slightly slower than Windows 98 SE.
I second this suggestion. I have an old touchscreen PC from about 2001 with a Via Eden CPU, which is an incredibly feeble low-power processor that lacks some instructions that were common even in 32-bit days, and Antix was the only reasonably modern distro I could get to run on it.