So i actually have the same laptop and had a ton of fun installing arch on it over the last christmas holidays. The experience made me understand a lot, triggered my new love for arch and was a fun project overall.
I ended up having a stable CLI setup with ytfzf and mpv to watch my favorite yt channels in glorious 720p, got bluetooth working for my headset and all. Very fun experience.
Edit: i am unsure on the 32bit part, I think mine is 64, could be another generation. In any case i also have 1gb of ram
The issue is that it is simply not built with reliability as a high priority so probably some hardware component shits itself too much after a while.There is a reason every reasonable company that needs a server to run reliably in production uses something orders of magnitude more expensive than a rpi.
You lucked out with your previous experiences, but many others did not, or the industry would not pay the price of a rpi a month to run a machine with the specs of a rpi.
That said, if you don’t need the reliability some easy hacks like a reboot cronjob or systemd timer, or trying to turn off unneeded services or peripherals could give you 90% of an industrial server’s reliability