How minimalist, and for what kind of hardware?
I am currently driving GalliumOS, which is an xubuntu fork tailored specifically for chromebook hardware. My hardware is basically the very definition of low end, but it works quite well.
(for reference, my Celes is packing the following "mighty" hardware specs: 2gb RAM, 32GB eMMC based SSD, dual core celeron N3050 clocked at 1.6ghz, Intel integrated graphics (Braswell), Intel high def audio. In addition to the weaksauce non-upgradeable "SSD", I have a class 10 128gb SDCard inserted into the slot, mounted as /home. I have a tmpfs mount providing scratch space for the browser cache so that the browser does not nuke the SDCard. (had that problem earlier. After putting tmpfs there, no problems. Right as rain.)
With zram swap doing its thing, this Celes (Samsung chromebook 3) runs pretty much like any other netbook I have used previously, and gets INSANE battery life, 8 hours ACTIVE USE per charge.
On a more off topic note, a neighbor girl wanted me to juice up her Falco (HP Chromebook 14). The Falco has an ACTUAL M.2 based SSD inside!! It also supports full UEFI firmware replacement to make it into a bona-fide netbook. Sadly, it comes with a terrible 16gb SATA based M.2 SSD. I have successfully gotten it to accept win8.1 with classic shell, Office 2016, and Firefox, all crammed into that tiny little storage. Poor thing, I had to turn NTFS compression on for the entire drive to make it all fit. It has a whopping 1.5gb of free space left. Just barely enough to "use" it for doing internet things, and writing documents. That is what she wanted it to do though, as she did not like being married to google docs/google drive, and thus the internet to do her homework. I will suggest that she drop me 65$ bucks for a proper M.2 SSD to insert into the slot. I will use disk imaging to image the 16gb module, push the image onto the new module, then expand the partition if she decides to take up the offer.