I had installed Debian on an Acer Aspire One Laptop. It has a 32-bit Intel Atom CPU with just 1GB of RAM. I obviously can’t run it like a usual desktop anymore, it’s way too slow.
I tried it to connect it to my TV with HDMI to create some sort of “Smart TV” setup, but that didn’t work out because I can’t even play 1080p videos on VLC with it smoothly.
So… What now? Can I only use it for headless stuff like pihole, nextcloud, etc. now?
Is there any hope left for my unsuccessful “Smart TV” contraption?
You might be able to find a super lightweight desktop distro out there (I think Damn Small Linux can run on those specs?) or you could repurpose it as a basic server of some sort like you mentioned. Unless you wanted to invest in some cheap old ram to throw in there and maybe make it a bit faster, then I think those would be your best options.
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
In addition to the good suggestions for others in this thread (like setting it up as a portable gaming device or a server of sorts), it could also be set up as a low-distraction productivity machine. I don’t know how well something like LibreOffice would run on it, but I imagine you could probably use a simpler word processor or even a plain text editor.
Worst comes to worst, I wonder what hardware support for this thing is in something like ReactOS or FreeDOS.
Print server, music box, copper scrap