Have you considered the macbook neo, it’s not a Linux machine, but it is probably the cheapest machine that fits the glorified tablet footprint. I don’t understand the draw to something that basic and lightweight, but if it mattered to me I would probably go with that. Otherwise, as others have pointed out, some flavor of Linux will run on just about anything that isn’t ARM at this point, and I wouldn’t be surprised if an old netbook would just work for your use case with a lightweight distro.
Have you considered the macbook neo, it’s not a Linux machine, but it is probably the cheapest machine that fits the glorified tablet footprint. I don’t understand the draw to something that basic and lightweight, but if it mattered to me I would probably go with that. Otherwise, as others have pointed out, some flavor of Linux will run on just about anything that isn’t ARM at this point, and I wouldn’t be surprised if an old netbook would just work for your use case with a lightweight distro.