FWIW I maintain a port of Debian stable for my XO-1 with IceWM and it's extremely resource-light on the aging OLPC hardware. I'd be happy to throw up the build scripts on GitHub if anyone is interested.
(Of course, keeping hardware in use even as software requirements increase is kind of a hard problem; Debian itself used to have its own projects - Emdebian 'Grip' and 'Crush' - to try and address that issue with a broadly Alpine- or pmOS-like approach, but these were abandoned a long time ago unfortunately. The whole "embedded" Linux space is a bit of a mess, and a broad, community-led project like Debian could have a positive impact there.)