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You understimate what we accomplished with 512MB of RAM in early 00's. Use a lightweight DE, or no DE at all.

I use cwm+st under Void and OpenBSD and it flies.

Yes, 512MB might still be usable with a 32-bit distro, as was used in the early 2000s.

My Athlon had 256MB and it ran Kopete and KDE3 fine.

I had 128 and was still fine, in fact I remember the first day i felt it was so fast lol

My old Sun 3/60 ran X11R4 with twm just fine in 24MB... and I had to walk up hill to school in the snow, both ways!

I remember the insane improvement I got from upgrading my Amiga 1200 from 18 to 130 MB RAM. If I'd still had it, then I'd be more than happy to use that -- I tried something similar around '05 and a 50 Mhz 68030 was more than enough for most of my daily stuff back then.

The biggest hurdle would probably be a modern SSH-client.

There are SSH and TLS clients for the Amiga in Aminet.

You may need a 68040 tho.

If you looking only at distros like lubuntu ... but there are barer, like puppy linux!