Agreed. A friend just installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix on my Asus 1000HE and it's very nice. I'm not a power user or Linux "geek" but have to say I love it. It felt great to completely blow Win XP off the unit... it became a completely new computer all over again after having it for 8 months. Really turned it into a new experience. Very fast. Easy to use. Chrome works beautifully. The whole experience makes XP appear even more ridiculously slow (and bloated) than i'd realized.
Oh, one last thing - Chrome is incredible! What a difference it makes - super fast, quick loading, no bloat. I loaded it at work on an older Win XP Pro unit and it made IE8 look so poorly executed. I've also used Chrome on our fleet of macs at home and am impressed with its speed.
If you have an Asus, there is nothing better than eeebuntu (eeebuntu.org). It's UNR with all the hardware tweaks specific to eeepcs (all the function buttons just work for example).
A default Debian install also recognizes all the buttons. There is no need to use special software for a netbook; they are exactly the same (to the software) as any other laptop.
Haven't tried Debian, but good to know. When I tried UNR, some of the function buttons didn't work (notably the one that turned off the wireless), and two-finger scrolling was really buggy feeling. I had similar problems with Easy Peasy.
Now that you mention it, my touchpad doesn't work right. (It is stuck in "absolute mode", not "relative mode".) I rarely use the mouse, though, so this isn't something that occurred to me to check.
Oh, one last thing - Chrome is incredible! What a difference it makes - super fast, quick loading, no bloat. I loaded it at work on an older Win XP Pro unit and it made IE8 look so poorly executed. I've also used Chrome on our fleet of macs at home and am impressed with its speed.