You’ll probably just want to skip down to the picture of a kitty at the end. I’m going to wax nostalgic about deep nerd stuff in the meantime.
Arch Linux – it ain’t yer grandma’s Ubuntu. Text-based installer. Configuration via text files. Does not come with gigabytes of crap (the ISO file is under 400 meg). Wont install a bunch of extra crap unless you ask it to, and still that extra crap upon install time is included in the <400 meg. The installer isn't completely hardcore - it does walk you through things rather nicely unless you really wanna cowgirl up and do things by hand. I mean, unlike Slackware it actually walks you through partitioning your hard drive. Slack still says "good luck with fdisk and figuring out where what and how to mount your shit." You *can* do that, the option is there if you wanna St. George and the Dragon your way through things.
You wont find all of Gnome and KDE and every possible little widget and doodad stuffed into your machine with a bunch of automated crap trying to run things for you. You wont find a system of configuration files that's completely divergent from the last 50 years of UNIX development that requires you to google to find out where anything is, only to have it re-written later by some tool that hasn't broken yet. You will find a BSD-ish configuration system that fits like a nice old pair of shoes (the kind you haven't worn holes in yet). A wiki on their website that contains useful information. Instructions that work.
You do have to enable a lot of stuff - like the networking, the package manager (cutely named 'pacman') repositories, etc before you're up and running. But, on the other hand, you're not running a bunch of crap you don't need by default, and you choose which repositories you use. You do have to cowboy your way through the configs with vi until you get pacman chomping powerpills and get vim installed (or you can use nano if you're still in gradeschool), but when you're done you got a smile on your face and find yourself flexing at your computer because you haven't installed an OS without mouseclicks in years. Even getting X11 installed and configged isn't too much of a hassle, but does require text editing and wiki-searching. And then in all comes together and you've got a working netbook again. Now, to get the LAMP back up and all my test sites rockin again....
Anyway, here’s your promised pussy:
Thanks for sticking with/skipping this far!