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> as I can tell, there is nothing in its package manager that doesn't run on hardware from 2016.

Right, but 20 years ago was 1999. I won’t be surprised to find out many packages won’t work: that CPU doesn’t have SSE2, the RAM limit is 512 MB, and typical systems usually had 64 or 128 MB.

The official page says recommended minimum requirements for Ubuntu 16.04 are 2 GHz dual core processor with 2GB RAM. 20 years old PCs don’t fit.



Ubuntu is heavy though. You can install the latest Slackware on a 486 with 64 MB of RAM.




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