Puppy, Porteus, antiX, Q4OS, Slax run on 32-bit x86 and are supposed to be under the 256 MiB RAM mark.
Zorin Lite and Xubuntu ~512MiB.
Mint, LXDE and Bunsenlabs ~1GiB.

YMMV

Antix,Debian ,arch i386 project

slackware, netbsd, openbsd

edit: i forgot tinycore, you gotta try that too

This thread is making me nostalgic for Ubuntu Netbook Remix

Since I doubt the latest and greatest drivers interest you, I suggest debian. Might as well profit from extreme stability and reliability

Debian. Just Debian. No drama.

OpenSUSE has a 32-bit build.

Running modern web browsers is no fun.

My eepc is also 32 bit with 2gb of RAM. I did Debian 12 with LXDE from the net installer and it works really well.

I've had good luck with Antix on very old machines.

I loved my Eee PC so much.

I’ve been watching and hoping for a modern ARM equivalent, but haven’t seen anything quite right so far.

Bunsenlab Linux..

Though don't expect miracles, that cpu is too slow for the modern internet. It's not usable for web browsing on any OS.

MX runs fine, but applications such as browsers are very slow because of the old CPU 😐

@ everyone recommending debian: it no longer supports 32 bit x86 machines: https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/release-notes/issues.html#reduced-support-for-i386

Something with LXDE or XFCE Desktop Environment, that is usually the DE for low-spec distros.

MenuetOS or KolibriOS

Maybe Haiku if you're feeling fancy

One of the OG eeepc is what got me into Linux. The distro it shipped with was ass (it was a Linux variant) so I went hopping and discovered Puppy Linux and a bunch of others. Ended up sticking with !# (crunchbang) which later renamed to BunsenLabs and I still run it on most of my devices to this day.

I'm not familiar with Eee PCs but I'm assuming you'd want something lightweight. Q4OS has a 32-bit version available.

+1 for Gentoo

Lets say I had 8 chromebooks 4gb ram idk CPU and their all working. What realistically could I do with them? Some lenovo some google.

Another issue others are not addressing is the memory limitations of 32bit software. I am facing it now with a large database that is stuck in a 32 bit world. You may have issues finding 32 bit builds of software as well.

Depending on the age of the EEE, you might run into problems because the old low end CPU doesn't support instruction set extensions that are assumed to be present by distros nowadays. I think it was SSE2...?

FreeBSD offers a 32 bit variant still via their i386 image.

Expect a small learning curve if you've never used UNIX, but most things are similar enough that you'll be fine. If you're ok picking up the FreeBSD handbook.

Void