I have an atom Asus transformer with 2gb of ram that can run but not much else. Any good 32 bit distros I can look into? Realistically I think much of the mainstream web browsers are becoming too heavy also, which is what I would primarily use and might be more of my problem.
Antix offers a 32bit build and only uses about 100mbs of ram(and systemd free as well it uses sysvinit and runit uses window managers like icewm jwm instead of regular desktope nvironments )
Re the web browsers I think you're right. You may get away with a more lightweight browser like SeaMonkey or Falkon, maybe like 1 tab of Chromium lol
Distros I'd try on that would be Linux Mint Debian Edition, Debian w/ lightweight DE like LXDE or Xfce, or Arch Linux 32 if you really want to make it minimalist. Gentoo if you're very adventurous but with my EEE PC I found compile times took up to days.