You can install Haiku, the BeOS clone. That one runs well on less than 1 GB of RAM, and it had a new beta recently. Linux requires a minimum of 2 GB RAM these days to load 1 tab on a browser of a middle-complexity website, before it starts swapping. To really use Linux more comfortably, you’d need 4 GB, I’d say. And if you want to do 1080p video editing as well, then 8 GB. So, try Haiku.

Znc server

Honestly, ewaste center.

Not much an atom with a gig of ram can do.

I’m using my old netbook as Pi-hole and some home server stuff. Does its job.

Something that I considered doing with a similar laptop, was to use it as a low-end portable gaming system. I’d take a lightweight Linux distro, like the 32-bit version of Q4OS if it’s system requirements are lower than your current setup, and get it loaded with a bunch of games with low system requirements and retro emulators. Obviously, it wont be anywhere near as powerful as your main computer (if you have one) but because it’s portable, there could be some value in having a portable gaming pc (unless you have something like the Steam Deck).

Some more things I’ve used old netbooks for:

Portable pxe boot server

Audio source for mixing (think using a mixing board to do audio collage work with tape, record and digital sources)

Midi sequencer- the cheap usb to midi breakout cable works good here and you really don’t need much horsepower to sequence midi.

Tracker playback and editing

Display driver/art/digital photo collage/digital signage/whatever.

E: People will tell you that you’re better off with a sbc because it’ll save you money on power. Do your own research on this. A kill-a-watt is cheap and the power savings quickly gets murky.

Print server, music box, copper scrap

Btw videos not working well because of absense of hardware decoding codecs, and it is make software decoding.

There’s lots of uses for it.

An overlay network like nebula uses “lighthouse” nodes as ways to reverse proxy to all the other hosts in the overlay. I’ve used og eeepcs as nebula lighthouses before.

“Dumb” 3d printers honestly don’t need much to bring their feature set in line with expensive ones. I still use an old netbook to control two. The screen and keyboard are great when I want to check files. Slicers and whatnot can easily run in low resource settings on those computers.

Vents allowing (and many netbooks do!), you can slide the computer into a shelf and use ssh to perform tasks on it. There’s a bunch of stuff that an always on computer with a built in battery backup can be used for at times, especially if it’s on a wired connection and you can use the wireless interface.

People will say you should be afraid of the batteries exploding or venting. I’m honestly not too concerned, but be sure to check them maybe once or twice a year.

I have a very similar spec Asus Eee PC that I use NetBSD with i3 on and it’s fine for like taking notes in vim or listening to music with strawberry. It can also run Haiku fine which I might switch to on it at some point because Haiku is fun. Anyway my best use idea is just use it to explore operating systems you’re curious about

It’ll run Johnny Castaway just fine.

I’m trying to utilize a couple of core 2 duo macbooks for the same purpose and it’s not going great. I have twice the cores and RAM but they’re stuck at 800 MHz, because of no batteries.

anyhow, very slow and issues with a lot of codecs I throw at them. try mpv without a DE/WM.