I’ve made a similar transition, and use Sun’s virtualbox (free for personal use) to ‘host’ the occasional Windoze apps I haven’t found Ubuntu or Mac replacements for.

OpenVPN is useful when you need more than SSH tunnelling (I ran into that with Aviosys 9280 powercontrollers crappy HTTP implementation).

Somethings else comes to mind. I’ve recently been doing some tinkering with running SSH tunnels back home and putting RDP sessions over them. If you can drive your machine at home whilst on the road then it furthermore makes the netbook OS immaterial.

I’m planning on using my netbook as my main machine for work and travel, and I’ll hook it up to a big monitor and USB/Bluetooth keyboard and mouse in the office. I’ve not done this in anger yet though, and if I end up plagued with issues around switching screens, or anything else, then I can see myself buying a ‘nettop’ or similar.

The key point is that there are a limited number of applications out there that can really soak up the power in a typical modern desktop configuration. Gaming, video editing and transcoding, and running multiple virtual machines are the main ones that spring to mind. Of course many of those things can now be done from the cloud (even the gaming), so it’s time to look closely at those utility bills and hardware depreciation.

I figure if I want to sit down at a desk and have a desktop computer experience, I could just hook a netbook up to my monitor and usb keyboard/mouse and go for it. But the versatility and portability of a netbook is extremely appealing.

A big concern of mine, of course, is whether netbooks have enough power to provide a decent computing experience for my tastes. I found your post helpful in that regard.

I did all of the above at GDC this year, and comparing my typed-on-the-fly notes with the handwritten scrawls my colleagues returned with was a revelation – I captured more details, more context, and more of my thoughts by an order of magnitude. It’s small enough to carry with a cig and a coffee, and large enough to type on. I’m loving mine so far.

I have also used mine as a gateway drug experience (Ubuntu in my case). It’s outstanding that I can use all the same apps that I’d use on my XP desktop with nary a hitch (Firefox and OOO mostly). I’m failing to see how the OS matters at that point …