The best possible use I can think of for one is disassembled and with just the screen and motherboard, running something like a full screen browser that auto refreshes a certain web page like the weather. With 1 gig of ram even the most minimal lxde or similar desktop environment is going to struggle to run a full size chromium or Firefox for anything more than one tab of browser content.
Or I suppose it could be treated like a CLI only info display panel running an ssh client and the "htop" output from a remote server.
I'm posting this off a 2009 Samsung NC10 Netbook running antiX linux 26[1] (32 bit, debian Trixie packages but an older 5.10 series kernel) and it has Abiword running, with ROXterm and Firefox with BBC News in the other tab. The netbook has a mechanical hard drive and a gig of ram and a small but not outrageous keyboard. It jogs along OK. I dug it out of the cupboard when I saw this post.
Not a snappy experience even with the light IceWM based desktop but useable and faster than some corporate PCs I've used in educational settings in the past.
[1] antiX strikes me as a lot less work than the OAs hand crafted Arch install but the whole point is you can do what you want with free software. https://antixlinux.com/
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