It’s an old model (Acer One D257) Processor is Intel Atom. Memory is 1GB DDR3 with 320 GB of HDD. I currently Have MX 21 running on it, but I need to reinstall because I forgot the root password. Since I’m reinstalling the OS, I thought I’d ask here for recommendations for an OS that makes the most of this oldie.
Personally I am using a netbook like this as a headless server with Ubuntu.
You can try to run Lubuntu, or even TinyCore and Puppy Linux on this for simple tasks.
Generally speaking, with 1GB of ram and Intel atom, as you stay away from video streaming platforms and use simple tools for writing text or run simple code in python, you would be fine. However with less than 100€ you can find laptops with core i5 4rd generation with 8gb ram. I am not sure if it worths it.
I had similar netbook like OP and was running Lubuntu for a very long time but afaik they dropped support for 32 bit architectures some time ago. I think 18.04 was the last 32 bit LTS? Not sure, I’d need to check it