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Building from source can take hours or even days on low-end machines though, unless you can get binaries for the apps you need for your old CPUs.

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I do not know what this means. What would you build from source for OpenBSD and NetBSD ?

Both support binary third party packages.

But building on Linux will also take just as long, so really a non-issue :)

Last time I used NetBSD I was building my own packages (and the OS itself) from source (http://www.netbsd.org/docs/software/packages.html). This was encouraged at the time. You could tweak them with various options and also contribute to the effort (https://www.pkgsrc.org/wip/).

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.

*BSD provide x86 binaries for most (if not all) packages so this is a non-issue IMHO.

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