Netbooks - yay or nay

A few months ago I purchased a Asus netbook, it's the standard model with the 10" screen. At first it was great, I installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix and everything was working. But soon after I started to do some real work that I found the keyboard was just too tiny to work on. The shift key was about the size of a regular key and I was constantly pressing the up arrow instead of shift.

After a short time I modified the keyboard to elimate flex and a few weeks later, the keyboard started to fail. At this time, I switched to using a Apple keyboard plugged into the netbook. Ironically my little netbook was now taking up more space than a full sized notebook. Once I had the netbook working again with the keyboard I tried a few more applications, getting away from the limitations of the small keyboard.

Interesting, I found that it was still hard to really do any work that required multiple applications or larger resolutions. For example, I'm reading about Ruby, it's a script program language available on multiple platforms. Basically you write the scripts using a text editor, save as *.rb, then run the files from a terminal using the command "ruby filename.rb".

This sounds easy, in fact you can have multiple windows open on a normal computer, and watch Hulu or something else while work. But not on the small resolution of the netbook. Due to the small screen size, just opening up the text editor you take up the entire screen. From here you need to switch to the terminal window, which also takes up the entire screen. It's not such a big problem, many people are used to switching screens, and many laptops are sold with low resolutions such as 1080x640.

The hard part is really working around these limitations and is the lower cost of the netbook worth the trade off. After spending more time, I feel like the netbook is great for checking e-mails, Internet, having fun with Linux packages but I'm not sure how much else.

Currently I keep the netbook for fun and learning but I'm building a new system which I'll pick a regular workstation with a standard processor.