

I just hit the same issue a few days ago. So Debian 12 (Bookworm) still has i386 support, but that support may end as soon as next year as they haven’t confirmed i386 as an architecture for LTS.
If you do go with Debian, you can easily choose a lightweight desktop during installation.







You should have seen the panic back in 2017 when my team found a cluster of Server 2003 running at a hospital.
The client thought it was fine.