Now that Mitchell has shared his views, I will share my views on the Eee.

The 8 GB drive on my Eee is fine for almost any OS.  Once you start using the machine, it becomes clear that the 2, 4 and 8GB drives available are simply not enough.  Plus Asus, in their infinite wisdom, has used the Union FS so that you can quickly restore the Eee back to the factory OS.  You can do this without needing to have a External Optical drive or a USB thumb drive.  It’s very convenient, but it takes up a tremendous amount of space on the 8 GB drive.  One of these days I need to follow the instructions on eeeuser.com to remove the partition.  This will make the full 8 GB of flash available.  I have already bought a external USB drive from Best Buy, which goes with me when I need the extra storage.  I have most of my music on that drive with a subset of music on an SD card.  I also have some video and a backup of all documents on the Eee stored on this drive.  Because it’s a portable drive, it’s completely powered by the Eee’s USB ports.  It takes up two of the three ports.  It runs just fine when it’s on battery but it does suck the battery down faster.  Soon I am going to be purchasing a 16 GB SDHC so I can leave the USB drive behind occasionally.

If your a geek or even used to the way Windows works, you may want to go to the Advanced Mode right away like I did.  This mode is more like what full time Linux users are used to.  You can expand it much further than you can with the Easy Mode interface.

For browsing, I find it completely acceptable. The horizontal scroll bar does show up, however it’s not too bad considering that most web sites have their ads running down one side or the other.  I don’t want to see the ads, so it kind of works out for me.  One thing that helps me a lot when browsing is using full screen mode by hitting F11.  This actually works out really well and you can even use tabs while browsing in this manner.  Also, I recommend installing the Tiny Menu add on to Firefox.  This add on shrinks the standard drop down menus to one menu called, of all things, Menu.  This works for Linux as well as Windows as do most Firefox extensions.  It buys you a bit more screen real estate to use plugins such as Forecastbar Enhanced.  Also, I recommend changing your theme to miniFoxFlat.  This theme makes all of the icons in Firefox smaller and gives you more screen real estate for the content your trying to browse.  With that said, watching video on some web sites is hard as you run the chance of cutting off the video.  Luckily, most often all that I lose are the controls so I can start it and move it up so I see just the video.

With miniFoxFlat Theme

With miniFoxFlat Theme Full Screen Mode

The screen real estate for the os in general can be improved further for advanced mode users by changing the kicker panel to tiny mode and applying the launch button hack that shrinks the button.  This let’s you actually see the clock thanks to the added kicker real estate.

While I am on Kicker hacks, you might also want to use the clock hack to change your time display to show AM/PM, unless you like using military time.

I have used the Eee to type up documents for class after upgrading to Open Office 2.4.  I have been able turn them in without checking them first in Microsoft Office, this is thanks to the really hard work of the Open Office team.  I applaud Asus for including the old version, but this gets into my biggest beef.  The Included Xandros is really old compared to Ubuntu.

I like that Asus shipped Linux on the Eee first.  I think that Linux has a foothold in Netbooks, and I am really glad that they are continuing to support it as an option.  With that said, I think the choice of using Xandros is a bad one.  Ubuntu is a much better distro than Xandros and it’s more well known than Xandros.  Ubuntu also doesn’t try to look like Windows as much as the included Xandros does.  The included version of Xandros is really constraining plus some of the things that work just fine in the apps on other distros does not on the Eee.  Which is why there are hacks to change the clock and other things that don’t quite work as nicely on Xandros as it does on Ubuntu.

Now that I have rambled on long enough, I am totally excited with what Mark Shuttleworth has announced regarding a remix of Ubuntu specifically for netbooks like the Eee.  This should make the much more massive Ubuntu fit a bit nicer on the smaller drives that netbooks include plus hopefully deliver some interface changes to make it easier to use Ubuntu on the Eee PC.

So does the Eee deliver what I need?  Not all of the time, but it does do everything I bought it for and more.  It’s an awesome machine and I have even heard from some non-technical friends at work who bought these machines for their sons and daughters and they are totally happy with the purchase.  Asus has a real thing going here and I look forward to seeing and playing with the new line of Eee PC’s coming out.