This laptop was originally sold with Windows 7 32-bit edition installed. Even back then it was really unresponsive and clunky. After several years of it lying around and being useless, I decided to do a really lightweight debian install on it.
And guess what? It can do so much more than sit idly in some landfill.
Now I can use it to write my study notes in neovim (gives me a good excuse to learn vim, and I'm learning slowly), listen to music with gst123, learn c and c++, torrent large files with transmission-cli and qbittorrent, and the list goes on....
I mostly just use tty. I hit "startx i3" if I absolutely need a GUI, but for everything else, tty. I use links2 for Wikipedia, online resources and browsing memes which is already a big chunk of my internet usage. I was really giddy when I saw Tor browser had a 32-bit version, it runs surprisingly well even with less than 1 gigabyte of memory (unless I visit some really bloated sites)
I can't play videos though, that's the one major thing it can't do. The integrated GPU is unsupported so playing videos or 3d-gaming is out of the question.
BTW is there a lemmy instance/frontend I can use via CLI or links2?
I'm still surprised there are 32 bit apps out there that are supported still. It's good to know there are people who are working to prevent e-waste.
Also that links2 thing is quite interesting.
It's a CLI program that can browse websites (only reads HTML). It can even display images, download files, etc... A lightweight and fast little webpage loader, I love it :)
There's quite a few. I have bunsenlabs helium installed on a 32 bit pentium M laptop. It's very usable, for a 20 yo single core machine. For basic things, it's still fine. I do have some gpu acceleration though which is a benefit.
I believe you could use qemu for 64-bit emulation on a 32-bit system