Apr 20

The Netbook Experience

About one year ago I bought an Asus eeePC 900, and was totally impressed with the size, weight, everything. But, you know, experience changes everything.

From the beginning: eeePC 900, the old model, features two SSD disks – 16GB and 4 GB. It uses a Celeron M ULV 353 900MHz Processor and I upgraded the RAM to 2GB.

The linux distribution that comes with the eeePC is useless. I’d say awful. Xandros is not even usable by newbies. I don’t even know what is worst, an eeePC running windows or Xandros.
WHY I GAVE UP: Awful interface, user experience, and slowness.

Ubuntu-eee is SLOW. But at least I could manage to configure it according to my needs. But the slowness was a serious issue.
WHY I GAVE UP: It was slow, and they released another version under another name.

Then they turned into EasyPeasy. It was “kind of ok”, but still too slow to do daily tasks like watching videos and listening to music. I gave up.
WHY I GAVE UP: OMG SLOW

My next shot was Crunchbang. I had Crunchbang installed for a long time because I feel it’s very customizable. The guys understood that not every netbook owner is a newbie. And netbooks tend to be slow, so running a minimal environment is always a good choice. But they are Ubuntu-based and they are stuck in Ubuntu 9.04. I tried installing some newer software, like latest pidgin and firefox, but I couldn’t compile the libraries needed without, basically, rebuilding the entire system.
WHY I GAVE UP: It was too out of date for me. Too bad

Jolicloud Screenshot

Jolicloud, with awful netbook interface

Then I decided to try Jolicloud. Their installation is fast and easy and pretty. Then you look closer and OMG IT’S A TRAP. Everything a medium/advanced user would like to do, “is not recommended because can break the system” or whatever. I absolutely HATE the “netbook look and feel” and I’d like to run plain XFCE or Fluxbox, but they don’t provide an easy way to do this because… yeah, you got it. What’s the problem with these guys? Do they think everyone is dumb and must be dumb forever? Well, their distro is well polished, but I like having some control on what I use and, yep, your window manager has terrible issues when managing non-maximized windows.
WHY I’M ALMOST GIVING UP: I don’t like being treated like an idiot

I’m looking out for new distros and I know there’ll be a new release of Crunchbang soon. I’m also planning to buy a new, REAL notebook and – uh – BETRAY TEH COMMUNITEH! – as I’m pretty sure I’m getting a good MacBook.

But I still like my eeePC, for being so lightweight and small. And I love to test new stuff, so I’ll keep everyone informed when I choose my new distro. I’m really impressed on how I came to hate my user experience with Jolicloud after only one week. These guys know what they’re doing – NOT!

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9 thoughts on “The Netbook Experience”

  1. Sugestão óbvia?

    Mantenha o netbook para testes e compre um Notebook com 13″. =)

  3. Hey, there. Power users tend to enjoy gentoo a lot. I’m a gentooer for quite some time already and I can’t live without it. I recently bought an eeepc 1000ha and customized it from scratch in no more than a few days. You could give it a try, portage rulez: http://www.gentoo.org

    Tibbs.

    • Oh yeah, I didn’t know about it, thanks, you know, there’s a friend of mine who was working for Microsoft who might be interested, his name’s Daniel Robbins, you should mail him…

      Ok… now, seriously… This is funny. I have been a member of the Gentoo Brazil community since 2003, and left it last year. I strongly suggest using funtoo if you’re really into power tools because it’s portage + git, so EXTRA AWESOMENESS.

  4. It’s been a month or two since I installed the Ubuntu Lucid Lynx beta in my eeepc 1000HA and I can say that, so far, it was the best distribution I ever installed in this netbook. I’ve tried ubuntu-eee, easypeasy, eeebuntu, etc, but they were all slow, outdated, or stuck to the “netbook L&F”. eeebuntu was the best one of them, but it was still outdated and a bit slow.

    I found out that most of the sluggishness in the previous distributions were due to a lack of proper support of the Intel graphics stack in X.org and kernel. Lucid Lynx has a newer kernel and newer X.org that have proper support and I can even have compiz enabled without having a major slowdown in everything I do. Chromium is way faster than Firefox in this netbook and uses way less processor power, resulting in a longer battery life. One other detail is that one should definitely install eee-control when using stock ubuntu, so that the profiles (powersave, normal, performance) embedded in the BIOS can be use.

    With this setup, I have about the same speed and a bit more of battery life than I have with the Windows XP that came with the netbook.

    I think you should give it a spin, just my 2c.

  5. Se você se sente confortável para customizar sua distro, creio que Debian seja uma ótima escolha. Para ganhar um pouco em velocidade você pode compilar seu próprio núcleo, de acordo com a sua máquina.

  7. I’m using Archlinux in my Dell Mini 9 and I’m very pleased with it. Maybe you can give it a try.

  8. Pingback: Dell 11z Netbook - TECHNIE TECH TIP BLOG

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