If you just want to play around with it, I highly recommend some arch based distro (because you can find plenty of obscure TUI apps in the AUR) with a window manager (be it tiling like Qtile or stacking like Openbox).
If you want something preconfigured, I've recently found instantOS, which seems to work fine for that usecase.
I use this small laptop mostly for ebooks (using the excellent epy) and music, using one ot the TUI YouTube frontends.