It's a shame that tablets have made this kind of form factor less desirable (also Microsoft did hobble them by reducing Windows licenses for them and thus the machines became less capable than the Linux powered ones). I'm a big fan of UMPCs - there's something very useful about having a physical keyboard so you can do serious work when needed but don't want to carry around a large laptop.

I've got a Chuwi Minibook (8inch screen) for that kind of usage and happily runs Linux on it nowadays (older versions of Ubuntu used to periodically hang which I believe was an issue with a driver for the disk).

I didn't buy a Eee PC, instead picking up an Acer Aspire One. Loved that little thing – it was great on the train – and was very sad when Arch discontinied support for 32bit processors. By that time the netbook market had died a death. (I, too, went to second-hand Thinkpads at this point.)

It’s a larger device, but I’m hoping the new Framework 12 comes in at a price point to fill the “cheap hacker laptop” category. The original eee was a fantastic “throw it in your bag & bring it anywhere”, and it all but required running Linux to get anything out of it.

There was a brief side line on netbooks where you could swap in a daylight-readable display of the sort used in the OLPCs, too, but I never had the confluence of money, time, and availability to make that happen.

I still have a netbook. It's not an Asus Eee but a Samsung N102SP.

I don't really know if there's any way I can use it for anything nowadays. Windows is out of the question - it originally shipped with Windows 7 Starter, which it was already struggling with, to be honest.

I tried installing Linux on it, and it turned out that it requires a proprietary graphics driver, support for which was dropped from the kernel at some point...

My beloved Asus 1215B finally gave the ghost last year, it served me well for travelling since 2009.

Nowadays this form factor is gone, it got injured with how Microsoft tackled the market they were initially losing, and got the final blow when tablets with detachable keyboards became widely adopted.

That is what normies are using all over the world in coffee shops, if not a regular laptop.

Likewise, now a Samsung tablet has taken over the role I used my netbook for.

This puppy ran X on FreeBSD beautifully, touchpad and all. Very handy for toting around to work offsite.

I picked up an Acer aspire one on clearance for a low price.

I added 4gb of ram to it and an SSD and it's ok for light loads.

It uses some AMD processor that has no cache or something ridiculous. C-50 Or C-52?

It also has a sticker for "HD Internet".

Loved my little Eee 901! It was the first computer I could treat as a casual accessory, not just a precious piece of precision equipment. I would take it anywhere - ski trips, the workshop, the pub; I wrote a fair bit of code on that machine while sitting at the bar down the street with a pint at my elbow. It was cheap enough that I figured I could just buy another one, if it broke, but it never did. I eventually graduated to second-hand Thinkpads, a habit I've maintained ever since.

I dusted off my old 701 with Puppy Linux and it still boots. It's a shame that model is just too small to be useful to me.

It was perfect with fluxbox though (except for the size.)

That was really a time to be alive. It was shortly after I moved out from my parents and my mother got one instead of a tablet. She's tech-savvy I have to say :)

All she wanted was an actually portable Windows device, and Asus delivered.

Celeron was as hot as iPhone for a moment then! There was a real hype around this device category ("Netbook" was the German marketing term)

I think mine had the CMOS battery fail and I never got around to replacing it. Just pulled it out of a Rubbermaid container last week and thought "man I should get this up and running again, what a fun little cyberdeck it was."

This machine was key to helping me learn Backtrack Linux (Kali's predecessor) and introduced me to Fluxbox.

Had one. Price was good, but the resolution made it nearly unusable with most DE's, and I don't think I ever got the nvidia card working on Linux.

Great concept though. I wish the format would have stuck around. I'd like a premium version in that same size.

I still keep an eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee pc running xp for burning roms.

I owned the eee 701 and it was fun using it in cafés. I graduated to the Acer 1410. Now I have a used Lenovo OG bought for $80 but its use case is similar to the netbook.

Mine is currently running 32bit Debian. Still runs fine, and can stream video from the big players despite how ancient it is.

When things go wrong, the Eee is the backup to step in and fix things.

I miss these. I had a netbook, used it for years with Linux. Loved it. Took it everywhere, even got the battery upgrade so it would last 20h on a single charge.

I had one. IMO they were crap, and died out for good reason. Cheap, but not good value because you never wanted to use one if you could avoid it.