>  ARM/x86/MIPS all can run Linux.
>   
They can but it's not about just running linux, it's about what is on 
top of linux.

Afaict only one of the major linux distributions supports arm and that 
distro is in the middle of a nasty ABI transition. Also afaict there is 
pretty much no standardisation of floating point on arm so unless you 
have a specialist distro for your hardware you will most likely end up 
using at best softfloat and at worst emulation of a FPU you don't have.

Flash and java are also issues, afaict the arm port of flash and the 
good arm ports of java are not freely availible and must be licensed by 
the computer manufacturer.

The result of this is most non-x86 netbooks are going to end up using a 
custom distro and switching away from it is going to be painful. While a 
custom distro gets arround the issues mentioned above it has problems of 
it's own. Installing extra software can often be a pain and the custom 
linux distro is likely stop getting security updates in an unacceptablly 
short timeframe (even major distros tend to have pretty short lifecycles 
for each release but at least with those there is typically a new 
release to upgrade to).


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