Porteus

Excuse my naivety. When I found out about Linux Mint, I was already dabbling in Xfce with Xubuntu. I then learned they had Cinnamon, Mate, as well as Xfce. So, I have been under the impression Linux Mint has crafted Cinnamon to compete against that Bill Gates OS.

Now that I have learned a thing or two over the past 12 months, I am trying to learn another thing or two.

What are the recommendations for loading Porteus Cinnamon on the oldest hardware? Let's go with a 2000 base year. If you want to dip down to 1998 that's cool with me too. But, I don't think Bill Gates 95 needs to be mentioned, unless you see a reason to bring it up.

I think I had a Porteus 3 something on an old Windows XP machine once. Haven't tried much on it since.

The first thing I'd do, whether XFCE or Cinnamon with quarter-century or older machines would be to disable compositing.

In the Cinnamon version I'm testing, (2.6), that can be found in:
Menu > Preferences > Effects > Desktop and window effects

AND, unless you've upgraded memory to 2gb or more, consider adding the zram paremeter to your APPEND line:
zram=33%

Tip: If you are planning on using the built-in wifi, then consider a modern usb-dongle version as they are definitely more secure. Likewise if your headphone jacks are broken, or the audio such a pita to configure (maybe), then another dongle, like the little usb<>audio ones perform well enough and being usb-based, get recognized easily.