@gotfw Interesting - I'd agree (with a sigh) that Ubuntu has indeed been kinda flakey for over a year now - Maverick was only a 'bit' strange on our hardware, but Natty was a royal pain (failed to function on 3 machines), and Oneiric not a lot better. And huge RAM impact!
But Lucid has been solid - this happens to be this machine's Lucid partition I'm using now, and it 'Just Works'.
Ubuntu have had their troublesome releases in the past, at least on our hardware, and we learned early on to focus on the LTS ones, especially for our posse of n00bs. Have not had a problem with Lucid on any of them in a year, no... more than a year now.
That'll be (ummm...) around 18 machines, I think.
Some of them are Ubuntu, some Xubuntu, a couple are Lubuntu (but that still has upgrade probs because it's not yet LTS) and one Linux Mint (Lucid base) but all of them work well, as does Bodhi. It compares directly with Lucid in stability on our hardware and (apart from a kernel-induced upgrade problem from 1.1 to 1.2 last summer) has been solid on our 8 machines - which includes the comically tiny and pleasingly inexpensive ($130) Genesi Efika MX 'smart-top' with a single core ARM at 800MHz driving our 32" living-room TV at 720p. Money matters more when retired!
I do like the idea of trying Arch.
A bloke we met at Linux.conf.au had it running well on his Toshiba AC100 ARM smartbook - I've been wrestling with Debian so that we can get Bodhi on board our AC100 eventually. But no luck so far.
An E17 release! Oh my! I'd love that to happen. All power to the Rasterman.... Be nice to welcome any Gnome expats to the goodness of E - now that we have good stability on some platforms.
