I've been doing some research for my fiance and a lot of time spent painstakingly emulating the specs of her netbook as close as possible. Of course different CPUs make it harder but limiting the clock speed to the same speed helps give a rough estimation.
A lot of you are tech experts so wont need this and have your own fav OSs, but a lot of people here will be stuck using Windows 7 not knowing what's out there.
Here's my Top 3 and Top 3 to AVOID with pros and Cons in each one if you have a netbook and are stuck on Windows 7 Starter.
3) JoliOS - JoliOS is bar far the lightest and simple of all the operating systems. It's basically an open source version of Chrome OS. It's cloud based, and boots in seconds. It supports Skype, VLC (although I was having playback options - but I think it could just need a H264 codec pack installed), Google Docs alongside Open Office and Live Office (Microsoft's version of google docs), all of these you can add to your desktop. Logging in is simple you can either sign up for a Jolicloud account, however you can more conveniently sign in with your Gmail (requiring Google+) or Facebook account. A lot of other Linux apps were available, although I must admit I didn't have time to see if Wine (allows you to run windows programs on linux) worked. If you don't mind just using cloud based apps and just browse the web then JoliOS is for you.
The reason it only reaches number 3 is too things, first of all the latest version of JoliOS (1.2) unfortunately has a really weird bug that means you have to hack it to play flash content and play flash games on Facebook. Which defies my fiance's reasons for switching from the RAM hungry Windows. Unfortunately none of the hacks worked for me.
Needless to say this OS took very little in terms of RAM, in fact the minimum requirements are for 256MB and it only takes up around 64MB of that leaving plenty for multi-tasking, especially useful if you like to run a lot of apps.
2) Ubuntu Netbook Remix - by far the most well balanced OS I tried it installs reasonably quickly, is very stable and has a lovely look. You can install a lot of software including Wine, and runs flash games which can hog up to 480MB in RAM (take Plants vs Zombies Adventures for example).
Unfortunately Ubuntu Netbook remix was discontinued in favour of just having Ubuntu Desktiop - a great and arguably far better alternative to Windows and OSX, unfortunately it hogs a massive amount of RAM - a little more than Windows 7 Home Premium! It does state you can alter the settings so it takes up a lot less RAM, but you really want to be hassle free like JoliOS.
So you have to stick with the last version of Netbook remix - a lot of apps like Skype wont install on desktop remix without knowing a lot about Linux or finding old versions which may require updating to work.
So if you want everything to work out of the box on a Netbook. The official Ubuntu package is something to give a miss
1) Lubuntu. Lubuntu is basically a hacked version of the latest build of Ubuntu. It's lightweight (32-bit version takes up roughly 70MB RAM, and with a netbook you only need 32-bit), and comes packaged with everything you really need to start off with, basic apps (like calculator), lightweight word processing, and spreadsheet apps, chromium browser (I did install the official chrome OS though as it worked just that little bit smoother for me with the flash support) and some free games bundled in that you'd expect (like minesweeper, free cell etc), as it's based off the latest version of Ubuntu it has full support of the apps and I even managed to run some of my favorite Windows Apps via Wine, with only a limited 1.6Ghz single core processor and 1GB RAM at hand this thing could multitask a hell of a lot, and with the OS only taking up 70MB I had a whole 954MB of RAM free to run all teh applications I wanted. Again Plants vs Zombies Adventures still took up a whopping 480MB, and I have heard that there could be buggs with file transfer - however I have not encountered these.
If you have a netbook and thought you were stuck with Windows 7 - there are a lot of alternate OSs you can run, all of these can be ran off a USB stick or a CD/DVD to try before you install, and many of them can be installed alongside Windows in clean and easy to use installation guides that partition your disk using an easy to use built in partition wizard so you know you aren't going to overwrite the windows partition.
Stay tuned where I give my top OSs that I thought would be great, but actually sucked for netbooks!
