"Once I had a taste of that Openbox magic, though, I
couldn't get away. After hearing about Mandriva's 2009.1 release,
which was built with notebooks particularly in mind (as well as
with a host of other improvements, naturally), I decided to give it
a whirl.
"Mandriva's GNOME release has a frankly alarming amount of
goodies, and I enjoy drak tools folded into the distro. The
hardware support for the 1000HE was perfect--perhaps due to the
fact that it came out a few weeks after Jaunty's UNR edition, or
perhaps Mandriva simply deals better with hardware this time
around. Either way, I was extremely pleased, but the speed seemed
just a bit lacking.
"Mandriva, of course, offers a great idea when you're dealing
with netbooks--use LXDE (which, of course, uses Openbox as its
window manager). The LXDE implementation in the task-lxde
metapackage in Mandriva is pretty gnome-like, apart from the
obvious (PCMan instead of Nautilus, but mostly you still use GTK
apps), but with a little bit of configuration, you can end up with
something fairly Crunchbang-esque."