I finally took the plunge the other day and decided to wipe the operating system that came with my EEE PC and install Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and I'm very glad I did! I've been using it for a few days now and am really pleased with it, the new interface performs excellently on the small seven inch screen of the EEE and the time and thought the designers have put into how to make the maximum use of screen-size has certainly paid off. A particularly noticeable example is when using Mozilla Thunderbird, on the OS supplied with the EEE was was virtually no room to type a message when starting a new email, the design of the netbook interface means that there is now quite a bit of space. Installing Ubuntu on the EEE was not a straightforward process with a lot of manual adjustments that had to be applied, but there is a lot of good documentation of there that really helps and it seems quite a community of people running Ubuntu on their EEEs.

The operating system supplied with the EEE, Xandros, was very flexible, and did have the advantage of being quick to boot. Ubuntu takes a bit longer to boot, which is a downside, but I have not found this much of a problem in practice. The factor that drove me to move on though was the situation with the UnionFS set up on the EEE. When supplied, the EEEs have a large read only partition on the hard disk, which contains the operating system, there is also a read/write partition which contains user data and user changes to the file-system. While this has the upside that it is possible to quickly restore the system by pressing F9 from the recovery menu, it does have the major downside that space gets wasted. If you download an update to OpenOffice for example, the original package would remain on the file-system, but the operating system would know to use the new version, the old version, thanks to UnionFS would appear to have been replaced, so the original can still be restored.

Mor Here