Goodbye, Xandros. Hello, Ubuntu.

As many of you know, I have an Asus Eee PC. It is a wonderful little laptop, and I carry it in my purse. One of the things that first attracted me to the Eee PC is the fact that it runs Linux, which I had never really played with much. I know, I’m losing geek cred here, but stay with me.

It came with a very cute customized installation of Xandros, running something called “easy mode” by default. It has a handy tabbed interface, with plenty of productivity software out of the box. Firefox, Thunderbird, and Open Office are all included. Here’s what it looks like.

While I loved the interface at first, I started to feel a little confined by it, so I enabled “Advanced Mode”, which gives you a full KDE desktop interface. It looks a little something like this.

But then the Xandros OS itself started to cramp my style. The more I used the Eee, the more comfortable I became with Linux. The problem is that a highly customized version of a pay distro isn’t really the best introduction to Linux. Linux is all about customization, but all the juicy repositories would break Xandros.

So, I am officially waving “goodbye” to Xandros. I am installing Ubuntu on my Eee PC as we speak.