I think you’re missing the key thing that netbooks did. Specifically: new, cheap, low power, and mobile cheap computing.

It didn’t matter how underpowered it was. Prior to the original netbook, the ASUS EEE 7", the alternative cheapest new computer you could buy was $600-$700. There was second hand computers cheaper, but they were a grab bag of reliability or results of abuse from the previous unknown owner.

These days that same niche is filled with $100 smartphones and $25 SoC comptuers like Raspberry Pi, but back then the EEE was a game changer for buying a computer, any computer, new for cheap.

Many of those other devices you mentioned had a market because the cheap netbook proved the market existed and was under served.

I’d agree with most of this, but I don’t think I’d argue they were ever replaced by anything else, just that the use case is too narrow.

Tablets are generally larger, have flappy keyboards if keyboards at all, are way more expensive, don’t have a built in mouse and often don’t support mice well, and they run a mobile OS, not a desktop OS. They are very different products solving very different problems. If you argue netbooks were just for playing movies, sure, but that’s not how I viewed them at all, especially since there were portable DVD players in the same form factor available for many years before netbooks existed. If that was the use case, there’d be no reason to run windows or have a keyboard.

I don’t see how they replace a large phone at all - a large phone is a much smaller screen and fits in your pocket. And makes calls. And is a touch screen. And has mobile internet access. They’re no where near the same thing.

Ultra books I think is the closest “replacement” here, but I’d argue it’s more of an evolution and/or a hybridization with a regular laptop.

I’d actually argue Chromebooks were the killer here. They still take notes well, are portable, cheap, have first party mouse support, are generally smaller and lighter weight, and are more type-able than both netbooks and tablets.

At the time there was no other way to get on the internet on the move than this except laptops which were really expensive then. This thing with a USB UMTS modem was just the coolest shit.

I hated mine, just to balance the prior comment.

It’s good with lightweight Linux distro and SSD. Still can’t do much beside the basic stuff, but much better than the Windows on HDD counterparts.

LoL yeah, I had a couple. A 10" and a 7". I ended up putting Ubuntu on there as well with xfce. It was perfect for streaming and doing a few web tasks. The hardware was crap though.

You could buy one with Windows XP back then but boy was it terrible.

Yeah! When I joined the team, the build system was basically a bunch of Bash scripts duct taped together so to speak. It would fail all the time and everyone was unhappy. Devs couldn’t get a solid image, nor could the QA team have a product that they were sure they could reproduce. The build team all quit out of frustration because everyone was blaming them all the time for delays and it wasn’t even their fault because they didn’t write the scripts.

Some intern started another script but left early in his project. He didn’t transfer anything to anyone and we basically had to take out his hard drive to connect it to my system to extract his scripts because he didn’t bother to give anyone the password to his machine.

I still had to redo everything from scratch because his scripts somehow only worked on his system and were not portable.

Over the course of one year, I rebuilt the whole thing from the ground up. And in the end, it was a mix of Python, Bash, Perl and it was using chroot jails and Qemu as a containerization system before Docker even existed. In the end, I could build a Linux distribution with any suite of software for multiple architecture using a simple config file. I had a master system that acted as a monitor and a load balancer that would delegate the builds to whatever machine or container was available and give me real time information on the progress of each build.

Then the company went bankrupt.

In the marketplace, but not my heart. Being x86 I could install Arch and openbox and it rocked. I’ve owned an ARM laptop, and it isn’t the same.

I also absolutely abhor touch screen interfaces. Bluetooth means it won’t be easy to debug boot issues either

I paid 430€ for the Eee and I paid 1100€ for the MacBook. Sure that‘s not just a little more money.

However, the way I calculate such purchases is: price divided by years of usage. I used the MacBook as a main computer for four years until I could afford a more powerful Mac mini as my desktop computer. I continued to use my MacBook intensively for university and for mobile photo editing for another five years. This means a total lifespan of nine years or 122€ per year.

If I had stalled my decision not to send back the Eee and try working with it ignoring the shortcomings, I maybe would have used it for a year or a couple of months longer. The netbook trend, according to my recollection was quite short so I guess I couldn‘t have sold it for a good price then.

So what I actually wanted to say is that the MacBook, despite it costing more than double, was by far the better deal for me.

“Best” is very subjective, particularly about Linux.

Are you just wanting to experiment with Linux, and don’t have much in the way of a “tech” background? Do you want a distro that more or less works right away after installation? Then Ubuntu (or one of its many derivatives) is probably the better choice for you. (I personally like Mint).

Are you a power user who compiles drivers for fun? Do you think that starting your PC after uninstalling your bootloader sounds like a cool puzzle to solve? Then you’ll probably find Ubuntu too restrictive.

It’s a very popular and user friendly distro, often recommended for beginners.
But it’s not just a beginner distro, it is also very versatile/powerful and well supported. So it can be used just as well by experienced power users.

The reasons to use other distros is not so much about what you can do, but more about how it is done.