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Install Gentoo <--- used to be a meme
In the past few years it has become much more user friendly. The install process is very similar to installing Arch, pretty much copy/pasting commands from the wiki (which is even easier if you SSH into the install media from another PC/phone).
The kernel used to require configured by hand so that only relevant drivers were installed for your system; nowadays there is a full fat kernel like you would get with another distro that requires no configuring, called
gentoo-kernel-bin.There are system profiles that cover the widest variety of CPU architectures of any distro to my knowledge. It used to even support extremely old archs before certain core python packages started needing rust as a dep.
Complex apps like Firefox and Rust both have binary versions in the package manager so you don't need to spend a long time waiting for them to compile on an old PC.
Obviously, won't be everyone's cup of tea but if you are a bit adventurous it is an option.
It is weird to see it be a somewhat practical recommendation. I mained Gentoo pre-0.1 days back when the alpha was revolutionary and the idea of including the stage 3 binaries in the distro was controversial. Wars raged in the forums over which USE flags worked best.
But then compute got so much cheaper I stopped caring and I mostly used corporate distros for work.
I recently installed LMDE on an ancient 1.83Ghz celeron netbook, but it runs like dogshit. Maybe I ought to dust off my USE flag game and see if I can squeeze more life out of it. I'm sure just using something other than cinnamon would work as well, but what fun would that be?
I believe there is also a flag for portage
-gI think that will download the binary for any package.I suppose the argument for fun would be from people who enjoy tweaking USE flags and other things but only on specific packages or have a very low-end PC which cannot compile much.
You could have a kernel-bin installed then spend endless amounts of time tinkering replacing glib with musl (which seems popular on IRC lol).
Also you can build for x32 (not i386), which would be faster than AMD64 on such older hardware.