Hey all. I just ordered my EeePC (should be here tomorrow) but I have to ask, what would you say is the best netbook distro?

I've really been wanting a KDE system, but KDE-Netbook is nowhere near ready for general use, and a full-on KDE environment might bring my battery life from 8 hours down to 2...not to mention the whole thing would look rather small (and be difficult to navigate) on a 10-inch screen.

So, any suggestions?

I already posted a link to my netbook screenshots in your other topic, so I won't do it here. Just wanted to say that I don't think KDE is bad on my netbook - quite the contrary, actually. I can customize it to my liking, e.g. remove all window borders and start all applications maximized.

As far as I know, KDE doesn't reduce my battery life that much (I haven't done any tests though). However, from what I've read, you can get longer battery life in Windows XP - I think it's because of the wireless network driver for Linux. But 6-7 hours is enough for me, and this is with enough brightness and desktop effects etc.

Anyway, my recommendation is to use a distro you're comfortable with. I use Arch because I wanted to try it out before switching my main computer (desktop machine) to a new distro. Also, Arch is simple to configure, has packages optimized for i686 and you only install what you need.

Overall I'm very satisfied with my setup, now I just miss a tiling feature in KWin (post-proned to 4.5, I heard. )
Have fun with your EeePC!

use whatever distro. use this opportunity to try out few distros new to you

switch off desktop effects to save battery

my experience on moms computer (full size core 2 duo notebook)

came with vista (without desktop effects) - 5 hour battery

upgraded to xp - 5.5 - 6 hour battery (probably lower cpu / graphics load)

linux with kde (desktop effects off) - 7 hour battery (probably better control of cpu frequency scaling or something alike)

Moblin 2.1 Preview 2 - Awsome boot times, nifty UI, may not suit everybones work-flow but suits the netbook screen format. I would imagine that they're using LPIA compile optimisations to get the best performance and battery range.
Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix - Supports a very important feature for portable (and therefore easily stealable) computers and that is home folder encryption.
There's also an Ubuntu Moblin respin available was well. This is probably more production ready than Intel's Moblin V2.1 Preview.
Kubuntu 9.04 - With 4.3.2 and compositing active, I found it to have similar battery life to XP (go figure!).
Kubuntu remix - Too unstable at the moment. (Tried it three weeks ago, it may have changed since.)

I haven't recorded battery times for most of the other OSes, but Moblin has the fastest boot times and is the snappiest at the desktop. Its still at the technology preview stage at the moment, but it's well worth the effort to test just to see whats coming up on the horizon. Extremely promising.

In theory, anything LPIA based should have the best performance and battery life on a netbook, but real life experience trumps theory.

LPIA based code is supposed to reduce power consumption by around 10%

There are netbook specific distros, eeeUbuntu and such. My netbook replaced a 6 year old 1.2GHz laptop so there was no performance decrease there for me, the netbook is fasterso I just installed the same distro as on my laptop. The only real issue I have with it is some dialog boxes are 600 or more pixels tall so I have trouble with the 600 horizontal res. Korganizer is 600 exactly so I just hide the menu bar.