My initial impressions of the latest Ubuntu Netbook Remix, Karmic Koala, were pretty good. A few days later, the impression has gotten better. Being a hardcore command-line junkie, I can still appreciate an Operating System that gives me Mac usability without the overpriced hardware and overly cutesy interface.
Codecs don’t come pre-installed, but are readily available for every major format in the base packages; including the official Adobe Flash player, and Sun Java plugin. Silverlight/Moonlight is nowhere to be found using the Ubuntu Software Center, but a quick browse to the Moonlight project page will give you a quick 1-click install for FireFox.
Although not, it should have been overly-obvious to me that the “Mouse” control allows you to enable touchpad scrolling (including two-finger scrolling).
Integration of Empathy and Evolution into the navigation bar at the top along-side the other nice icons (wireless signal, battery life, clock) give it a smartphone meets full size computing feel. It puts you right into a usability comfort zone for mobile computing.
The installer works great, and the automatic resizing of the Windows partition and Grub dual-boot configuration was a breath of fresh air from installers of Linux past.
Despite what other may say, OpenOffice is a great [freee] alternative to Microsoft Office, and it has more than enough features for mobile users.
Finally, like most Linux distributions, although it may seem bloated by the dependency hell you suffer whenever you install the smallest utility, the base install, everything I’ve mentioned, as well as the development set I have installed (NetBeans, MonoDevelop, Eagle and a full LAMP stack) still weigh in at a miniscule 3.8GB.
I’m running all of this on the stock hardware (Atom N270 & 1GB of RAM)… so don’t think you have to drop a stack of cash upgrading your netbook to make it a usable system (unless you’re afraid of trying Linux because you realize you may actually like it, and limit yourself to Windows).