I understand your reluctance to throw that nice little netbook away. Actually I used to own a very similar model until recently, an Acer Aspire One ZG5, with one of those infamously underpowered intel Atom processors (and GPU). I bought it used (dirt cheap) in 2015 (it was new in 2010) and installed.....

(before LTS support runs out) Disclaimer: This article is not a complete tutorial, it is simply a set of notes I took down following these instructions. Today I found out that the debian security team handles oldstable releases only for a year or so, after which the LTS team takes over, which is arg.....