
Love my 901
About a month ago I was able to find one of the last Linux Eee 901s with the 20GB SSD. I didn't want a hard drive because I use it on the train, and I didn't want to pay for a Windows license I wouldn't use. I absolutely _adore_ it, but it was only usable after I installed a real OS on it. (I chose Debian 5.0 Stable.)
I don't understand why they put an idiotic bastardization of a GUI in their factory Linux installation. It's no wonder customers loathed the "Linux" version-- it had even less functionality than Program Manager in Windows 3.x.
Any distribution with both GNOME and KDE installed would have been much more usable. No matter which environment Asus set as the default, users who were new to Linux and willing to look around a bit in the menus would have had something close enough to Windows that they could have learned to use it without much trouble.
What's especially embittering about the whole thing is that the Windows XP 901 comes with such a perfect, crudware-free XP image on it. They probably didn't have enough space to crud it up in the sparse 12 gigs of storage the Windows version comes with. It would have been wonderful if they'd shown the same restraint toward Linux.