The Polylith
A very scuffed but "usable" Computer
Vista
This was the original OS meant for this PC. Modern programs were able to run using the Extended Kernel. With this, new (circa v100) versions of Chromium were able to run on Vista, enabling me to use this (I daily drove it for an entire week!). Also, most minecraft versions (up to 1.16, where the OpenGL version requirements changed after) worked with no problem. Another game, osu!, did not work, along with osu!lazer. However, an older fallback version of osu! did manage to run; although the circles seemed to have improper offsets.
Void Linux
Void Linux was a distro I always wanted to try, since it seemed pretty unique, using runit and musl, instead of the more common systemd and glibc. Being a modern linux distro, most things tended to work, except proprietary binaries (looking at you, Nvidia) which were compiled for glibc, and not musl, forcing me to use nouveau. Beyond that, I did have some issues relating to minecraft (and osu!) running, creating an amsuing theme that Vista is the most supported OS on this PC.
OpenIndiana
OpenIndiana (OI) is an illumos distro, illumos being based off of Solaris. Funnily enough, Nvidia has their proprietary drivers for OpenIndiana (well, Solaris, but OI is binary-compatible). Unfortunately, despite being built off work from the people who made java, I had a lot of trouble running minecraft. Though, it's mostly a problem of no launchers being ported to OI, and if I were to port, say, PrismLauncher, I would probably be able to run minecraft.
Haiku
After having two unix-y OS's, and a Microsoft-y one, I decided that Haiku would be a good distro to round out the Polylith (I chose it over SerenityOS since I wanted a not-unix-y experience, and Redox because I couldn't get it working). Although Haiku doesn't have 3D GPU acceleration, it is a fairly Robust OS. I had a pretty modern browser (Gnome WEB) running, and can even run Minecraft (though it would be CPU-only, so...). Haiku really succeeeds in just being a clean OS to run, and could reasonably be used for basic work (writing, spreadsheets, basic web stuff, etc), which I might start doing...
