I had an eeepc 901, used it for years with linux. First it ran gnome 2 I think, then xfce. Perfectly useful little machine. In later years I switched to lxde to eke a little more out of a little less.

In that form factor, and costing what it did, I was massively impressed.

I had a college professor who loaned me one for a project and it was absolutely unusable in windows. Took like 10 minutes to boot to the desktop (although maybe he had viruses, wouldn’t have surprised me, and he certainly didn’t have an SSD in it).

Lxde is great though and sure id believe that. I ran lxde on a single-core Phenom low power thing and with a SSD it was marginally usable even with that complete shit hardware.

Yeah I think the solid state storage card really made it workable, I got an add-on 64Gb card at no small expense, doubled the RAM (to 2GB!), and linux was generally very happy on there.

100%, SSDs make a massive difference in perceived performance. That laptop (it was an AMD V140, it was the Compaq CQ56 shit-top they sent out to replace laptops after bumpgate) was completely unusable with a HDD in windows but between a SSD and lxde it became marginally tolerable. It certainly wasn't fast but it could browse the web and it could play hardware-accelerated youtube if you used H264, etc.

I actually would not be surprised if, at the extreme low-end like the V140 or the Atom netbooks, that a SSD actually produced measurable increases in CPU performance. Not only do you have iowait which generally doesn't count as "idle" time according to linux (and probably windows) cpu utilization metrics, but even if you account for iowait, swapping off for another task while you iowait likely does have a performance hit in terms of caches that are no longer hot and so on, so performance is likely diminished when you come back to it too. And with no SMT, and only a single thread, context switching does become comparatively much more expensive in that fashion.

I agree, the Atom processors have tended to be fine. Lots of questionable accompanying technology choices or marketing practices though.

1st gen Atoms with the chipset (945?) that was bigger and hotter than the processors was kind of amusing.

That Intel can't help itself from making confusing product names is pretty inexcusable. If a 'Pentium' is an Atom or not makes a big difference in what the specifications mean, and it's not clear to regular people that a dual-core mainstream Intel is about performance equal to a quad-core Atom (assuming similar age chips).

Laptop makers love to combine atom CPUs with amazingly slow spinning hard drives, and they're usually pretty small too. Windows 10 performance on a spinning drive is trash, and it's even worse when it's a low rpm laptop drive. Doesn't help that they're often as little ram as possible and soldered down (although even with 8GB ram, Windows 10 will flog a spinning drive just sitting at the desktop; who knows what it's doing).

It would be interesting to see a 4p+24e or 6p+16e setup for parallelized loads though. Not sure there's currently a need for that on the desktop though.