In setting up Battlestations - Building out my local machines I've realized that 32-bit is not nearly as dead as assumed....
- Wayland is not designed for running older software, which it effectively ignores as cruft.
- For 32-bit support you'll want to go back to X, which is still well supported in LXQT, Xfce, MX Linux, Anti-X.
- Multi-Architecture Support in Debian remains, but is decaying.
- All older software with 32-bit dependencies, meaning any game made more than a few years ago, can be run through Steam's Proton.
- Installing Wine means re-installing 32-bit architecture on your system. Ironic.
- Proton has been removing support for older video hardware, so you'll want to try version at 7 or older in order to fix problems when running older 64-bit and 32-bit native Linux games.
- See Selfhosted services for ultra lowend hardware
- Rust, Go and other new technologies actually make it easier to build tooling for 32-bit hardware!
- All 100 services listed are great! Old or new, running any of them is highly recommended!
Will keep updating this as explorations continue, but turns out I can still run into issues with 32-bit dependencies and requirements in 2026.