I have to admit I fail to understand the appeal of netbooks. I see many people running around with them in our department, so they must be popular. I don’t think I could use them as they probably fail to do pretty much everything I’d be interested in. All that while being significantly less pocketable than my iPod touch – which I bought with tasks like IMDB and Wikipedia surfing in mind. Tasks which it handles reasonably well.

(Still nice to hear that the Linux became more tolerable, though.)

As I suggested, I don’t take it out much, actually. Occasionally, I’ll carry it to the coffee shop. It weighs about half what my MacBook does. Right now I’m sitting in an easy chair, and it’s just about right for answering a blog comment. :) It’s really unsuited for long typing. Like I said, it’s a toy.

My coworker swears by Crunchbang for netbooks, and is waiting for a released based on Karmic. My other coworker swears by Snow Leopard on his HP Mini - he points out that the license says it can only go on Apple branded computers, so he put an Apple sticker over the Dell logo.

I thought about going the Hackintosh route, but decided what I like about Macs is not having to regularly perform the sort of unnatural configuration contortions required to keep one going -- dodging system updates, dicking around in the firmware, etc.

Ubuntu is as close to fire-and-forget as Linux gets, and I guess I appreciate that at this state of my impending cranky-old-manhood.

Apropos of the last comment: Mac OS X 10.6.2 rumored to block Atom support, foil netbook OS X booting.

Great pictures. Welcome home. M.