MadaboutDana wrote:

So it was with great pleasure that I recently installed the latest
version of Xubuntu (12.10) on a rather nice Asus 1101 netbook I've had
for a couple of years. [...] And lo! I now have a nice, speedy
little netbook with an operating system that is actually pretty much
state-of-the-art. It boots in around 40 seconds, runs very quickly,
loads e.g. LibreOffice, Basket NotePads (despite the latter's KDE
libraries), Google Chrome, Thunderbird very fast, runs Dropbox, and
links very nicely to my local WebDAV servers. What a little gem!

Anyone interested in trying out a lightweight Linux might want to take a look at Voyager Linux http://voyager.legtux.org/ It is a customisation of Xubuntu with a great choice of software. It would take one ages to find all those programs.

There are some interesting shortcomings: there's no Google Drive or
SkyDrive clients (although there are workarounds for both).

Can you share a tip or two on the workarounds? I have found the following, which I've used in Windows in the past:
http://storagemadeeasy.com/?p=static&page=LinuxDrive

And just to keep this topic very vaguely relevant to the forum, you
might want to check out the very pleasant CherryTree, which is a
cross-platform dual-pane outliner.

There are some interesting outliners and information managers in Linux that don't exist in Windows, e.g. like Semantik which is a mind mapper of sorts developed for working on long texts. Unfortunately, for me, cross-platform compatibility is something I hereon more or less require from such software.