Anyone know if it's possible to run a modern distribution on this? I had a bit of difficulty running full-fledged Linux on a Thinkpad X60 due to it being 32bit. Linux mint debian edition came to my rescue, but I wonder if you'd need linux from scratch or something like that.
The kernel itself is still fine on 486s and there are a couple of distros that should still technically work. Obviously nothing 'full fledged' is going to fit in the RAM on the thing or run at any sort of reasonable speed.
Gentoo is probably the easiest mainstream distro to get running just because you can fiddle with all the compiler flags and kernel options. A few people have also put together small custom images with modern kernels for this class of hardware.
I don’t think most distros compile for i486, minimum is i686 (not too familiar with the jargon though, before my time). Even the kernel itself was going to trash i486 support entirely. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-i486-Linux-Possible-Drop
There is a big slowdown from win98se to win2k, it is the same on Linux with 2.2 kernel and the 2.4. You would best using an older operating system, shutting down most of not all services and connecting through a very strict proxy
