I recently got a 10 dollar working netbook from a thiftstore. It has 2 ram and is from 2010 but isint the up-gradable version. Im wondering what os to run on it do i go with something like a android build or a linux setup? Im could also use some neat use cases. Ive thought about doing retro game on it but there are possible better solutions?
You can have a lot of fun with it. I assure you. And you can still command the cloud and much of the web (including LLMs) from such a machine.
With a text-mode editor, you can do a fair bit of programming. You could teach yourself Docker.
There are lots of entertaining games that would run on that machine.
If this was the only machine you had access to, you would be amazed at what it could do. We are spoiled.
That said, I agree that one overly heavy JavaScript web page could bring it to a crawl. Both things are true.
There are still a lot of 32 bit distros based off Debian (like Q4OS mentioned above). Debian no longer supports Pentium though. If you need that, go for Adelie Linux.