The Grumpy Editor's 2008 retrospective

that being said, I have had the best results so far with the debxo images (debian)

I expect the ubuntu option to work about as well, but the one image I tried didn't want to work from the USB (looks like a bootloader being hard-coded for the SD card slot, but I haven't tried it yet)

all the debian options and the ubuntu option are small enough to fit in the built-in flash (unlike the fedora 10 image)

none of these do power management well yet, the problem is that the OLPC team went their own way (again) and instead of teaching the kernel about the power management options they created a userspace tool that accesses the hardware directly to do the power management. until this gets fixed (which _is_ on a short-term roadmap) it's just about impossible to do power management properly without running the full olpc distro. I see battery life in the 2-3 hour range with no power savings.

but things are changing rapidly, a month or so ago none of these distros was able to access the game keys on the screen, or control the screen brightness and mode. at this point I believe that the XO can run a kernel compiled from raw kernel.org sources (also not possible a few months ago)

it's hit the point where the various options can be used, so more people are trying them, each doing small tweaks to fix things and the results are getting combined.

Sugar is so slow that KDE and Gnome both seem fast by comparison. I don't have enough experiance with LXDE or Awesome to really use them, but they are considerably smaller (and should be faster)