Its super easy to get a no-bloat operating system. Not from microsoft, but there's a flavor of linux for everything.

How well does Linux run on Windows 3.1 era hardware?

As someone who ran Linux on Windows 3.1 era hardware, perfectly well.

Very well, and striped down kernels run on hardware with even less resources today (embedded systems) than 3.1 minimum requirements. If a platform has lost support, and there's sufficient money in it to justify it, you can always go back in time to an older kernel. What really sucks is when a platform vendor maintains their own tree and it gets lost to time.

The real pain is populating the userspace if you need more than just busybox.

There's distros for this: https://github.com/marmolak/gray486linux – it's based on Linux 6.7.

Never used it; don't know how well it works in practice. But it's the type of thing that can be made to work. Looks like some minimum requirements are a tad higher than the minimum of Windows 3.1 though, so it depends a bit on what you mean exactly with "Windows 3.1 era hardware".

Pretty good I would imagine. The first public release of Linux predates Windows 3.1.

I can't read the original article anymore.

The orginal Win311 ran fine for 30 years probably until the HDD failed and they need someone to do a reinstall. Why would they change the operating system?

My comment was replying to someone claiming that you can’t get a no-bloat operating system like 3.11 anymore. I was just pointing out that it has been possible the entire time.

It would certainly be silly to change OS just for the sake of it on a 30 year old project.

There is no Linux flavor that is even remotely comparable with Win3.1 if you include the GUI in the comparison.

I think it is doable if you don't change the hardware.

But once you add the expectation that it should work with future hardware as well maintain backward compatibility, then bloat is inevitable.