Every distro in this roundup, however different in look and philosophy, sits on top of the Linux kernel. When Linux drops hardware support, other distros follow.

In April 1989, Intel announced the i486, the first x86 processor to break the one-million transistor barrier. The first machine to ship with the chip was the Apricot VX FT server, a behemoth that cost nearly $18,000 (the equivalent of $48,342 today). Prices came down in a few years and a wave of iconic machines followed. For instance, IBM's PS/2 line, which had already made its mark by introducing the eponymous port and by popularizing the VGA graphics standard, gained a new lease of life with i486-powered models.

Killer apps included Doom, which was released in 1993, and practically demanded an i486 to run properly. id Software's recommended spec was a 486DX at 33MHz. Quake pushed many i486 machines beyond their limits. Of course, by the mid-nineties, the Pentium series hogged all the limelight, but the i486 never went away. Intel kept manufacturing variants for embedded systems until 2007, and, remarkably, Linux continued supporting i486-class hardware until June this year.

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