Got the same Atom N270 on my good ol' Aspire One, pretty poor performance for today's standards even for light desktop use, nevertheless its strong points were remarkable at the time, netbooks equipped with this single-core Intel CPU made awesome low-cost and low-consumption machines to tinker with - with the advent of mini-itx boards, it wasn't rare to stumble upon cool projects such as DIY car-puters and [link|https://www.mini-itx.com/projects/|so on|new_window=true]. Sure, it was not suited for multitasking, but you would get a decent and compact starter PC or retro game emulation machine for games from the 80s-90s (up to 16-bit gen probably) for a reasonable price.
Personally I tried many different OSs (even an open source Amiga workbench [link|https://sites.google.com/site/arosaspireone/|clone|new_window=true]!) among which Ubuntu, but now many 32-bit variants are being discontinued. I suggest you give Antix (Debian based GNU/Linux distro) a try, I have 19.3 on my netbook and it feels super fast, considering it runs on an impossibly slow internal flash drive.