Playing with one of the lil netbooks mentioned in the Playtoys post, I’ve been very pleasantly surprised at how nimble it is with Linux Mint 17.2 Xfce. It’s actually much more responsive than any of the other distros I’ve played with on the thing, so responsive in fact that I might just leave this distro on it for use. Heck, it works so smoothly even without the planned memory upgrade that I’m almost tempted to cancel the memory upgrade for this one. Almost. More memory is almost always better (especially since I found a source for the same memory modules that is less than 2/3 the cost of buying them from the manufacturer–Amazon, of course).
This lil thing is actually useful for more than just web browsing, now. Pretty amazing.