Not so much, actually. When you aim for anything that resembles modern “desktop computing” (maybe with at least some “web browsing”), you are limited to decent hardware configurations from last 15 years or so. Yes, you can show to your grand-grand-grandkids how it really was back in the days once, but you are not going to study the splash screens while programs initialize, or wait for each image to appear for a couple of seconds when skimming trough an archive, or watch page load progress bars move in the browser. But with that decent hardware, you almost always can install bog standard modern Debian with an ascetic desktop, and have much less support issues than with specialized system. It'll be the same Linux anyway.
Although it is possible that it won't work for some top performance purely 32 bit CPUs, because non 64 bit builds are certainly out of fashion today, even though some 32 bit distributions still exist.
The computer I use most of the time is a 19 year old (2005) laptop. I run Debian with LXDE and Firefox on it and, although you have to be a little bit patient with some websites, I am generally still very satisfied with it.
I suppose it's a desktop replacement model with desktop Pentium 4 and whole 2 GB of memory which cost thousands of dollars? Regular Pentium Ms of the era get dangerously close to netbook Atoms in performance, which is certainly the bottom of the barrel.
Not so much, actually. When you aim for anything that resembles modern “desktop computing” (maybe with at least some “web browsing”), you are limited to decent hardware configurations from last 15 years or so. Yes, you can show to your grand-grand-grandkids how it really was back in the days once, but you are not going to study the splash screens while programs initialize, or wait for each image to appear for a couple of seconds when skimming trough an archive, or watch page load progress bars move in the browser. But with that decent hardware, you almost always can install bog standard modern Debian with an ascetic desktop, and have much less support issues than with specialized system. It'll be the same Linux anyway.
Although it is possible that it won't work for some top performance purely 32 bit CPUs, because non 64 bit builds are certainly out of fashion today, even though some 32 bit distributions still exist.