I recently went with 32bit OpenBSD and Alpine Linux while revamping a small collection of Atom & Pentium M netbooks (the Toshiba Portege was as thin/light as the Macbook Air) after replacing the spinny disks for SSDs.

Alpine is great because you can keep your home dirs, some configuration & packages etc. on an encrypted thumb drive that can be swapped between computers.

It's like an author using an old typewriter to focus, can't use Chrome (too slow) but NetSurf is great for occasional HN and reference material browsing.

All I really need is a shell, Vim, i3, Python and a compiler... reminds me of the Minix days - just you, an editor and a C compiler without any distractions.