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There is a perfectly modern Debian distribution available as 32bit. I put this on a 12 years old computer. Yes, that's not 20 years old, but the architecture is largely the same.

GNU userspace as well as the Linux kernels have not abandoned 32bit x86.

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This is true, however some devices including floppies, tape, and optical media have been made impossible, more difficult, and/or inconvenient to use with modern kernels.

And then there's throwing away 386 compatibility in 2012 and now they want to nuke a bunch more.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=2021-Lin...

I was also surprised that Debian was not the list of distributions they tried. That would be the first one I would reach for in this situation, and indeed is running fine for me on a VPC 256MB of RAM (although it is a 64bit CPU).

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