I have been using my Dell Mini9 Netbook for about a year now and I really like it. It’s small, fast and convenient. One of the things I have come to really like is Ubuntu Linux. I like it so much I took an old 800 mHz Pentiium 4 that had been laying around in my house, wiped Windows 98 off the hard drive, and installed Ubuntu 9.10 on it. Now it is usable again. It is still a bit slow for local applications, but with my email, calendar, ToDo list, and more and more of my documents now online in the cloud (Thank you, Google!), I spend most of my time in the web browser anyway.
It was a bit of trouble upgrading the Mini9 from Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) to 9.10 (Karmic Koala) because I wanted to install the “lpia” (low power information architecture) version rather than the “netbook” version and I had to hunt it down. I also updated the BIOS, and that was a bit of a problem because Dell seems to support its Windows users better than its Linux users. Still, however, with the upgrades it seems to run even faster, cooler, and with longer battery life.
And, of course, any software I want: office, internet, games, audio/visual, productivity… are all free!