I have found that Openbsd and Netbsd often work better than Linux on older PCs.
Non-UNIX systems like KolibriOS, Haiku or Aros tend to fly on hardware where UNIX does not.
On an old enough system, FreeDOS, ELKS or Fuzix.
Non-UNIX systems like KolibriOS, Haiku or Aros tend to fly on hardware where UNIX does not.
On an old enough system, FreeDOS, ELKS or Fuzix.
But note, if OpenBSD is installed on a "very" lightweight PC, you may need to disable re-linking of the kernel :) I thought I saw issues with this in the mailing lists if less than 1G memory.
I think NetBSD is the champion with OpenBSD a rather close 2nd.
Both support binary third party packages.
But building on Linux will also take just as long, so really a non-issue :)
I did install pkgsrc on Ubuntu to get around snap but building anything took such a long time even on modern hardware. But that was building all the dependencies from scratch. After that it should take less time.