FWIW I maintain a port of Debian stable for my XO-1 with IceWM and it's extremely resource-light on the aging OLPC hardware. I'd be happy to throw up the build scripts on GitHub if anyone is interested.
Doesn't the XO-1 have only 256MB RAM? That's definitely enough to boot Debian Stretch and get to a desktop, but I'm skeptical that it's useful for any real work.
(Of course, keeping hardware in use even as software requirements increase is kind of a hard problem; Debian itself used to have its own projects - Emdebian 'Grip' and 'Crush' - to try and address that issue with a broadly Alpine- or pmOS-like approach, but these were abandoned a long time ago unfortunately. The whole "embedded" Linux space is a bit of a mess, and a broad, community-led project like Debian could have a positive impact there.)
I would absolutely be interested! There was a great deal of experimentation with alternate distros when the XO-1 was first released, but virtually everything from that era has succumbed to link-rot.
(Of course, keeping hardware in use even as software requirements increase is kind of a hard problem; Debian itself used to have its own projects - Emdebian 'Grip' and 'Crush' - to try and address that issue with a broadly Alpine- or pmOS-like approach, but these were abandoned a long time ago unfortunately. The whole "embedded" Linux space is a bit of a mess, and a broad, community-led project like Debian could have a positive impact there.)