May I add: * People willing to do maintenance (testing, debugging, upstreaming patches etc). For a many-platform OS like Linux it's probably not that hard to

May I add: * People willing to do maintenance (testing, debugging, upstreaming patches etc). For a many-platform OS like Linux it's probably not that hard to keep an arch supported once the plumbing is in place. It's not like there's new 486 based IC's coming out regularly. But still... someone's gotta do it. I suspect much "supported" was already in the form of: platform-specific drivers in-tree, arch support in place, all that stuff compiled, done. But at the same time, if you'd take result & run it on real 486 hardware, expect loads of issues. Software in source format tends to bitrot after testing/use on physical hardware goes away. Binary, less so (but of course other issues there).