It's really shocking how much Linux Desktop has let itself go over the years. I remember when you could recommend someone install Linux on an old laptop to get it responsive again, but nowadays that advice isn't true anymore.
This single 650MB CD IMO it is one of the most complete distributions in terms of what it includes and you can do with it. It includes a complete desktop environment (KDE 1), development tools (with an IDE), graphics editors, productivity tools, typesetting tools (TeX, LaTeX, Groff), databases, clients for mail, irc, web, etc, media players, a bunch of games and - most importantly - documentation for pretty much everything accessible right away from the panel at the bottom (...although ironically while there is also a "getting started with linux" document that describes the basics, for some reason it is not linked and not even compiled... you need to already know the console and docbook tools to compile it and read it :-P).
And on that machine is still very fast and usable. I tried it at some point a while ago and after playing with it for a while i started reading some of the included stuff and after a while i forgot i was in an emulated environment since everything was responsive. And this is, btw, exactly how i remembered it - this distribution was the first Linux distribution i ever used on my PC in 1999 (which was a 200MHz Pentium MMX with 32MB of RAM).
(as a sidenote, yes this is the same Caldera that renamed themselves to SCO and made the infamous lawsuites, but this distro was made before that time)
[0] https://archive.org/details/OpenLinux2.3CD [1] https://github.com/86Box/86Box
The book turned out to be garbage, but the CD changed my life. I still keep it at my desk 20 years later.
My first real distro was TurboLinux 2.0 - IIRC, that was on a Zenith 486 laptop with 8 MB.
Then I moved to RedHat 5.2 (don't recall the machine, some old desktop tower I think - maybe a P90 w/ 16 MB but I am not certain of that - might've been my AMD 586/133 box at the time).
x4 inflation over 20 years?
But as i wrote, Slackware is the closest which is why i have an ISO of the latest DVD available on my external HDD to throw in a VM whenever i want to try something on Linux. Also (and this is only tangentially related) i like that it still provides "full" distribution media (in comparison Debian has become so overloaded with packages that to download installation media for archival/offline use you need to build them manually yourself and even then it is several blu-ray disks).
FWIW i do not think it is impossible to make something similar, but it would require a lot of work, especially on the desktop environment front.
The unsolvable problem for older hardware unfortunately is the web browser; there's nothing the operating system can do to make websites less complex, and more and more sites are becoming ridiculously bloated with scripts and media which will lag badly even on modern PCs. Still, ignoring the web browser element, Linux as an OS is highly flexible, and it can be made to run well on just about anything. That's still one of its core strengths.
This is simply not true. It isn't just about the GPU, it's about everything accruing bloat.
I pulled out my old eeePC 700 a few weeks ago and couldn't find a single currnet distro that would install on it. So it's stuck with the one that came with it and the old Firefox browser, both of which are probably full of security holes.
Not even Debian? Mind you, I'm not aware of any other distro that's both current and has 32-bit support... And the Asus eeePC 700 is a potato by modern standards. (I mean, 2GB SSD? At least it can easily be made to boot from an external SD card.) But even the bulk of netbook-class hardware is well supported, AFAICT.
But it at least got farther than Q4OS, Haiku, and others.
My Altair - older still.
I have a chunk of core memory with 3mm torroids and bakelite framing; that's almost positively ancient in computer terms...