Comment by walrus01
14 hours ago
The best possible use I can think of for one is disassembled and with just the screen and motherboard, running something like a full screen browser that auto refreshes a certain web page like the weather. With 1 gig of ram even the most minimal lxde or similar desktop environment is going to struggle to run a full size chromium or Firefox for anything more than one tab of browser content.
Or I suppose it could be treated like a CLI only info display panel running an ssh client and the "htop" output from a remote server.
I'm posting this off a 2009 Samsung NC10 Netbook running antiX linux 26[1] (32 bit, debian Trixie packages but an older 5.10 series kernel) and it has Abiword running, with ROXterm and Firefox with BBC News in the other tab. The netbook has a mechanical hard drive and a gig of ram and a small but not outrageous keyboard. It jogs along OK. I dug it out of the cupboard when I saw this post.
Not a snappy experience even with the light IceWM based desktop but useable and faster than some corporate PCs I've used in educational settings in the past.
[1] antiX strikes me as a lot less work than the OAs hand crafted Arch install but the whole point is you can do what you want with free software. https://antixlinux.com/
Install ZRAM and try Otter Browser instead ffox. Set adblocking at Otter's settings. Also, Dillo from git it's uberfast and good enough for news, blogs and HN.
Also Alpine Linux (32 bit, the extended edition for better hw) will run faster than Antix.