Under push from my good buddy Ahmer, I installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix on my brand new netbook. Cowardly, I ran it as a dual booting environment thinking “I could always go back to the Windows 7 when I get frustrated with the Remix.” Within a few hours, probably 4, I was set on using Ubuntu Netbook Remix instead of Windows 7, and here’s why.

I picked up an Asus EEE PC for it’s battery life, I decided that having a laptop with 4gb of ram and a 2.0 dual-core processor was a waste. I seldom use my laptop for anything other then writing, even then it’s for storage of pictures or other data. The fact that the netbook carries a 9+ hour battery life was a huge seller, however my Dell still averaged 3-4 hours on battery.

Once I booted up the netbook, the first thing I noticed was that it took (what I considered to be) a long time booting up. I ran it through it’s steps, once I set it up, and it still seemed to be lagging on the Windows loading screen. I never got around to timing it, though. Other things that normally take time seemed to take a bit longer, i.e. loading Mozilla. I thought to myself that it was an acceptable trade off, who was I to complain about a minute or two waiting for it to boot up.

Any who, Ahmer convinced me to install Ubuntu Netbook Remix with the reasoning “might as well.” After installing it from a USB stick, I rebooted the computer in about 60 seconds. That’s 60 seconds to power off and back on. At this time I had installed it on the second partition, leaving the two factory partitions and the Win7 partition. I spent the next couple hours playing with the simplistic UI, installed Chrome, Pidgin, OpenOffice and Adobe Air. All applications I’ve used regularly on Windows. While the UI was a bit different then what I’d expect, it is not only efficient, but makes perfect use of the screen on the netbook. Essentially, I think Ubuntu Netbook Remix serves it’s goal here, providing an interface anyone could use. I think It might be fair to say that on a 10”, or smaller screen, it would be preferred over a “normal” operating system’s UI.

After a while, it really started to sink in that the Netbook Remix was a lot faster then Windows7. Within a day, I wiped the hard drive and started from scratch with Ubuntu Netbook Remix, using a 4gb swap and getting rid of anything Microsoft on the netbook.

While I am not entirely a Linux newb, I still haven’t been convinced to use Linux as my primary operating system on my desktop. I use enterprise builds on my servers, primarily CentOS, and have virtual machines running Ubuntu on my desktop. Oh, I also have an Android phone.. if that counts. Overall I’d say I’m still pretty young, in terms of Linux experience. However, the transition for the netbook was flawless and improved the performance and usability significantly.