There’s already a bunch of distros for lower-end hardware. PuppyLinux is probably what you’re looking for, and it’s actually a genre of distro that takes a typical distro like SUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch etc. and packages it into a slimmer spin with some shared utilities.

I know this is being treated as a social engineering attack, but having unreadable binary blobs as part of your build/dev pipeline is fucking insane.