32-bit oddities
Those trusty 32-bit CPUs are vulnerable to the speculative execution attacks that have kept on coming since January 2018. These were mitigated (albeit some months later than their 64-bit counterparts) in the kernel, but the associated fixes led to some hard-to-squash bugs. The dearth of 32-bit hardware in the hands of people capable and willing to fix these means that doing this will be the new normal.
ENCOUNTERING PROBLEMS “There are other problems you’ll encounter running on old hardware. For a start many of them don’t support booting from USB.”
A 32-bit system, it is said, may only address 4GB of memory. This would be fine for a machine that’s not doing anything challenging, but would not make for with a few tabs open will chew that up in no time, but there are countless lightweight alternatives that better suit such hardware. That 4GB limit is generally something of a misnomer, since most chips and chipsets produced after the millennium (and a few Pentiums from before) ship with the Physical Address Extension (PAE). This allowed larger physical page addresses, meaning that through the wonders of virtual pages, up to 64GB could be used. This comes with the caveat that a single process may only address 4GB. You can see if you’re running into memory trouble or resorting to swap space (also detectable by the sound of hard drives being thrashed) by running:
