One of the first small projects I worked on when i was starting with python was a telegram birthday reminder bot as i really didn’t want to rely on Facebook for that. At first I was just looping over all the entries in a list, then went to a database, at some point added fuzzy search, adding and removing entries. Still use it today.

Imo the best way to learn is to think of a project that you personally find useful and need solved for yourself, not some abstract exercise.

I have a similar device, made around 2013, Atom CPU, 2 gigs of RAM, 32 gig emmc drive, no exandability.

I run Arch with QTile on it without much of a problem, though as others have mentioned, web browsing would be a pain with more than a few tabs open. Youtube is a no-go too.

I currently use it mostly to test an image editing GUI im working on. I know that if it is snappy on such poor hardware it would work perfectly fine anywhere else.