I am running Ubuntu MATE Vr. 18.04 on my 32 bit PC laptop computer. It works well for me and I like it very much. Is there an update available for my system?
Please reply in plain English, not Linux or computer jargon, both of which cause me to freeze up.
Thank you for any help that you can offer.
Regards.
Albert.........
That depends on which UbuntuMATE you are using. 18.04 was the last to have i386.
You can search for "Linux" "32 bit" and get numerous lists of distros that still provide an i386 version. Debian is among them, and can have the MATE desktop added in.
Being the parent of Ubuntu, it will probably be more familiar feeling than OpenSUSE or Slackware or Gentoo, not to mention the intentionally really lightweight distros.
There may be some newer simple-to-install distributions out that that I'm not familiar with.
The other issue you may find is that newer applications will require more cpu or memory than you have available, but without detail on the computer or which version you are using, or what you want to do, it is hard to say.
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is now end of standard support.
If you are using a supported architecture you can have ESM or extended support options, however that is not all architectures and only includes a subset of the 64-bit architectures (no 32-bit; so no ARM32/armhf or x86/I386)
I still use i386 or 32-bit x86 hardware myself (mostly old IBM Thinkpads I really like), and have written about this on Lubuntu's discourse (as it's down I can't provide links to what I wrote there currently), but I wrote that I intended moving my own hardware to Debian; which I did a long time ago now. I outlined the reasons for the move prior to EOSS for 18.04 (2023-April).
I'm a Ubuntu member which means I get 50 machines I can extend LTS life using the ESM options, however that won't help a i386 machine.. which is why I jumped ship and went to Debian just after 18.04 EOSS for my last machine running 18.04.
Me, I'd recommend Debian. As for what release, that varies on your hardware & what you'll use your machine for. As I also do some QA of Debian releases too, I've found some of my hardware performed best (GPU or graphics/video hardware specific) on old-old-stable (10) rather than later releases (kernel mostly being the issue; not all GNU/Linux distributions have kernel stack choice as Ubuntu offers it); yet on other hardware it made no difference, thus I'd use stable (12) or old-stable (11) on those. In most cases my i386 hardware runs Debian 10 or 11 (ie. I vary version depending on my hardware; those running Debian 10 will upgrade in a few months to 11 which I've confirmed they'll run, just as they didn't perform as well running 11 I'll not move until I need to in June 2024)
FYI: If using a 32-bit ARM cpu; you can use later releases of Ubuntu & Ubuntu-MATE. Ubuntu 18.04 (18.10/19.04) were the end of the road only for 32-bit x86.