Sounds like a good way to make use of old eMachines, at a large discount too.
Finally, the year of the Linux Desktop! (eMachine edition)
I mean, installing alpine is surprisingly simple and is capable of playing HD youtube by modern standards
Important note: alpine is black magic and the comparison I'm making is not really sensical if we take into account that one needs at least some terminal knowledge for alpine, let alone install doas instead of sudo (which is bloaty, as it turns out (for alpine stabdards at least))