I too had it and remember it fondly, it got me through my studies. Very portable machine. I eventually swapped it for a thinkpad which I loved even more. Now I’m with a MacBook Air for the time being, but I think I’ll get another thinkpad when the time comes
After this Eee PC I bought a 2014 MacBook Pro, again amazing machine. Used it through out my CS studies and beyond. After that I had some different machines from my employers but my personal laptop is a ThinkPad t480s, nice machine for Linux.
I miss the form factor of the old netbooks. The 2gb swappable to generally up to 4gb ram was really never great, though was fine with linux as long as you set your swap partition up correctly, though I wouldn't be expecting much in the way of running things like virtualbox or any modern IDE. The 32bit support only was fine then, not now (and with only 2-4gb ram, you didn't want 64bit anyway).
Perfectly adequate for most web dev, scripting, blogging, chatting, network stuff, remote systems administration, etc.
The old netbooks took handling less carefully much more well than anything now other than probably an Apple laptop (I mean, if it fell, odds are it wouldn't break as easily; the ones with hard drives, maybe not as well, but it took more than once; talking the screen and keyboard).
I imagine this is why you liked it. Easy to backpack with.
They were also great for running out for coffee and working without schlepping a full-sized laptop.
I mean the ones with hard drives, not the ones with teeny tiny ssd's. Hard to do much on those, and slower.
Is crunchbang still around?
No, the project leader (corenomial?) packed it in. BunsenLabs is one follow on project and the other is CrunchBang++. Alas both I think are 64 bit only in recent versions because they are based on Debian, which from Trixie (v13 on) is 64 bit only for installation.
I'd look at antiX for reviving a netbook if limited to 32 bit.
The last I used crunchbang was when crostini/crouton was still being developed for chromebooks. It sorta sucks that 32bit is officially dropped for linux. I mean there are still old versions, but as far as bringing old things back to life for nostalgic purposes or merely to detach from AI completely, it's getting harder not to have to know a lot more.