I’ve seen videos of people running Damn Small Linux with a GUI on Pentium 1s.
None of them are very recent, so I don’t know how well ‘modern’ DSL would fare on a P1, but there are a few recent videos of people browsing the web using Dillo on Pentium 3s.
I installed Debian Buster and ran Firefox on my Pentium 3 750 a couple of years ago. It wasn’t very fast or very usable, but I ran it.
I mostly use that system for retro games in DOS 6.2 and Windows 98. The Debian installation is my utility OS for when I want to transfer new stuff to the DOS partitions, because it’s way easier to connect it to the network.
If you’re not planning to run GUI
I’ve seen videos of people running Damn Small Linux with a GUI on Pentium 1s.
None of them are very recent, so I don’t know how well ‘modern’ DSL would fare on a P1, but there are a few recent videos of people browsing the web using Dillo on Pentium 3s.
I installed Debian Buster and ran Firefox on my Pentium 3 750 a couple of years ago. It wasn’t very fast or very usable, but I ran it.
I mostly use that system for retro games in DOS 6.2 and Windows 98. The Debian installation is my utility OS for when I want to transfer new stuff to the DOS partitions, because it’s way easier to connect it to the network.