Well, I dunno what's best these days, I'm more interested in what works. I got a HP2140, as "business" netbook on the pricier side, but with the 5105 released the 2140 should be available for cheaper somewhere. I paid $700 CAD but that includes taxes, our beloved "you just pay that because you are in Canada premium" etc. so in the States that would have been a bit cheaper. And I got highres screen(1366x768, not really necessary I'd say now but nice), also the 6 cell battery, ugly (sticks out) but runs about ~6h. The aluminium casing and the keyboard were the main reasons I got it, but your needs may vary there. Archlinux on it: I kept XP on a 20GB partition, need it to update camera firmware. I installed from USB stick which worked out of the box after i shrank the XP partition. Need broadcom-wl from AUR, works flawlessly, even with N routers. Bluetooth works, I got a mouse running with it. XFCE works nicely, my guess is pretty much every desktop would do it. I have the compositor running, xfwm with shadows, but no wobble effects or anything else. Laptop-mode-tools are installed as well. As far as I can tell I have all hardware working without any problems. here are some excerpts from my rc.local: echo -n 'ondemand' > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor echo -n 'ondemand' > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/cpufreq/scaling_governor echo 5 > /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/nmi_watchdog echo 1 > /sys/module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/power_save echo 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/sched_smt_power_savings echo 1500 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs for i in /sys/bus/usb/devices/*/power/autosuspend; do echo 1 > $i; done echo min_power > /sys/class/scsi_host/host0/link_power_management_policy echo min_power > /sys/class/scsi_host/host1/link_power_management_policy echo min_power > /sys/class/scsi_host/host2/link_power_management_policy echo min_power > /sys/class/scsi_host/host3/link_power_management_policy echo min_power > /sys/class/scsi_host/host4/link_power_management_policy echo min_power > /sys/class/scsi_host/host5/link_power_management_policy hcitool hci0 down -T
