Others have made suggestions before me. I just moved the PC to Debian Squeeze as the package management methodology is familiar. Gnome 2 supported for another

Others have made suggestions before me. I just moved the PC to Debian Squeeze as the package management methodology is familiar. Gnome 2 supported for another 18 months or so (perhaps longer depending on the time it takes for the testing version to become the new stable). I suppose it depends on the versions of the software you need access to. I also moved to a tiling window manager, dwm, prompted by the need to purchase a new monitor and getting a largish widescreen one. The 'stack' of windows runs down the right hand side, the 'main' window is on the left. I've set the split to 60/40. There are 9 tags (aka workspaces) and hibernate to disk works well, so I have stable window layouts that work for weeks... Xubuntu is fine on the netbook, students can understand the one panel at the bottom.