I recently discovered kmscon: a hardware accelerated utf-8 & emoji capable replacement for the standard Linux console. Put that on.

See if it runs either Menuet OS or Kolibri OS, they're about the smallest non-linux OSs I know of.

You could turn it into a Home Assistant control panel if it has touch screen support

Swap in a new display controller board, get a cheap Bluetooth keyboard and wire the eee PC (maybe?) to the controller board. Then, remove the internal board and drive to make space for an old Android phone on which you can install a Linux distro.

Voila! A "laptop" that you can upgrade whenever you get a new phone or if someone donates a phone to you.

Or I could recycle it

Could you really? E-waste recycling is a great lie made so that people don't get remorse over throwing away their devices. Electronics are too complex, diverse and full of toxic stiff to be property recycled.

If anyone wants to dive more into this, there has been some projects where people from higher income countries put tracking devices inside e-waste before sending to "recycling", to find out where they end up. Spoiler: in poorer countries, to either be scattered around, thrown into a landfill, or be scavenged by underpaid people without any protection equipment.

WireGuard, and an external HDD. Run at a remote location for off-site backup.

I do this with a raspberry pi 3 at the in-laws. I copied the data over locally before setting it up, and after that it's just nightly incremental rsync, which is fine even over my slow (35Mbps) upload.

I don't think there's any useful way to put it to regular use for yourself, but you could:

• install debian on it and keep it around in case of an emergency. turn it on once in a while to keep it updated (doesn't need to be that often, it's debian)
• use it on the go (no worries about it getting stolen)*
• use it a place where you wouldn't use your main laptop as to not risk damange (camping, hiking, on a trip, etc)*
• install a friendlier linux distro and give it away to someone who doesn't have a computer (a 10yo cousin maybe)
• give it away to someone who has a computer, but doesn't have a second one and might be happy to get one to play with

*though i imagine the battery is not in good shape given your "beaten up" description

Server for various open source games that don't require much cpu or ram. E.g. freeciv, battle for wesnoth.

Host a Lemmy server

As a TV for your kitchen?

Minecraft server is always easy and fun. Honestly any game server.

You could use it to host a simple webpage too.

If it’s an asus ee, the vents are all on the sides. With a couple of shims underneath it would fit in a bookshelf with a bunch of other books.

As far as uses… nat hole punching for an overlay network is one way I’ve used these devices before.

Assuming it's not completely useless for this purpose, you could load FreeDOS on it and use it for playing older PC games.

MS-DOS 6.22 would be sub-optimal as it was designed with 486-era and older hardware in mind and since it doesn't support FAT32 and only supports FAT16, you're limited to 2GB partitions, while FreeDOS is actually designed with newer hardware like this in mind and supports FAT32 and thus larger drives.

Batocera linux and retro games!

Could use it kind of like an extra monitor with something like Barrier.

Could use it like a home assistant for a kitchen or something, but I don't know if there's any good privacy respecting software for that ATM (looks like MyCroft went bankrupt).

I used an old laptop I had laying around for controlling a Maslow CNC. Could also use a laptop to run OctoPrint or something.

If it has an ethernet port (or perhaps a USB to ethernet dongle), maybe a PiHole DNS using Debian or the like? It is apparently supported on other Linux distros than Raspbian.

If it supports micro SD XC (i.e. capacities higher than 32GB) or you have a USB hard drive or high capacity USB flash drive, maybe a samba server for file storage? I often use my file server as a substitute for digging out a flash drive any time I want to quickly pass a file between two machines in my house.

It's okay to let things go when they're not useful any more.

Or, turn it into art.

Well, right now I’m experimenting with an old mini PC, and using a couple of USB HDDs im creating a ZFS pool to serve as storage for an email server

Try to flash Coreboot on it.

@monovergent I've always wanted to get something like this and just make it boot up to a full screen asciiquarium. Lol

@remindme@mstdn.social 24 hours "remind me"

Bitcoin node maybe?

Nothing. Power waste and it doesn't do much.

Home Assistant host MAYBE, but you can find lesser power straws to run that.