I never thought I’d witness the release of 3.0 in my lifetime

There’s a new trend with immutable distros and they have some pros and cons. OP’s stance apparently is that they’re the future

https://itsfoss.com/immutable-distro/

Yeah, well maybe you should put this into your graph as a choice. You might not like it but Ubuntu still has a major support for anything Linux related. Any manufacturer or software development - if they support Linux, there is a high chance that they mean basically Ubuntu, quite often they tested it just there. This is a HUGE advantage for any beginner.

Beginners don’t care about behind the curtain stuff, they just want things to work. And you might not like Canonical but Ubuntu does this

I had similar netbook like OP and was running Lubuntu for a very long time but afaik they dropped support for 32 bit architectures some time ago. I think 18.04 was the last 32 bit LTS? Not sure, I’d need to check it