I have this cute little netbook, an Asus EEE 1000h, which came with a semi-crippled variant of Xandros Linux. It worked fine since I could always drop into the terminal, and I eventually got enough additional packages installed to make it useful, but in the course of trying to install a more normal desktop interface I managed to wreck it – nothing ever works right the first time in Linux-world.

Yesterday I finally got around to installing Ubuntu netbook edition. Wow! It’s smooth, consistent, and doesn’t condescend to its users the way Asus’ custom Linux did. It’s not trying to be Windows or Mac OS, either; it’s just a nice, well-built system that suits the hardware perfectly. Definitely satisfied – ex