The Verdict

Although a death knell hasn’t yet been sounded on distributions aimed at 32-bit machines, the day isn’t all that far off. If you look at the announcements from distributions that have already abandoned producing a 32-bit variant, or others like Ubuntu that plan to stop incoming releases, you’ll realise the amount of work and time it takes to support these aging machines. The demand for these comes down further with each passing year.

Of our selection, Feren OS too doesn’t plan on providing a 32-bit release from 2023, when support for the current release comes to an end. With the rapidly decreasing prices of hardware, and the increasing resource requirements for most applications, there may come a time when 32-bit machines can best be used as either paperweights or to play a hand of Solitaire. But until that time, distributions such as the ones featured in this Roundup will help you put the machines to use any way you want.

Void Linux comes in last because of its minimalist nature. Although this isn’t a problem in itself, the distribution requires too much work before it can be used for anything except browsing the internet.

Feren OS is considerably better in this department, and its rolling nature means that you won’t have to worry about reinstalling it to get updates. The project is still quite young and was started by a young developer. It had stiff competition with Sparkylinux and Q4OS to decide the 2nd, 3rd and 4th place finishers. But the Feren OS project was started by a young developer and as there’s no information available about the development team behind it if there is one, so we have decided to push it past the podium.

With the Trinity desktop environment, and various other custom tools such as the Desktop Profiler, Q4OS is one of the most polished distributions we’ve come across. It’s a delight to work with, and the KDE fork provides a lot of options to users to configure the environment to their liking.

But Emmabuntüs wins this Roundup for a number of reasons. It has the largest compliment of applications available out of the box, which means that if your old machine has enough RAM, you can use it for just about everything from accessing the internet, to creating wondrous music, and more.

1st EMMABUNTÜS 9/10

Web: http://emmabuntus.org Licence: GPL & others Version: DE

3 It has all the apps, now it needs to work on its speed.

2nd Q4OS 8/10

Web: https://q4os.org Licence: GPL & others Version: 3.10

Some eye candy and better documentation would win it the first position.

3rd Sparky Linux 8/10

Web: https://sparkylinux.org Licence: GPL & others Version: 5.10.1 it should consider offering its custom tools out of the box.

4th Feren OS x/10

Web: https://ferenos.weebly.com Licence: GPL & others Version: Classic

Won’t be supported beyond 2023. Lack of transparency on the developer too.

5th Void Linux 6/10

Web: https://voidlinux.org Licence: GPL & others Version: 20191109

The rolling-release distribution has potential. The installer needs an overhaul.