Mint is the way to go for me, I am using an XFCE desktop on my new Aspire One, and a Cinnamon desktop on my wife's - it's a totally different 'experience' with the same distro.
BEST LINUX DISTRO FOR ASUS EEE PC 701 WINDOWS
When my wife's main laptop died (fan - awaiting replacement) I made her new laptop dual boot Windows Vista and Mint. Bhodi is very pretty, with whizzy animations, but not worth the wait. Before even taking the sticker off the screen, the stock 1-GB memory was replaced with the new stick. Next - I bought a newer Aspire One - this time with Windows and a hard drive - and made it into a Quad boot machine (getting clever a clever a*s now!) with WIndows XP, Mint, Jollicloud, and Bhodi Linux. The box on the doorstep contained the ASUS eeePC 1000HE, a Logitech XV Nano mouse, a replacement 2-GB DDR2 6400 memory module and arrived just two days after I placed my order with CompUSA online.Total retail bill for these parts came to US520 with tax. Having grown bored with the Ubuntu Net Book Remix, I decided to have a go with a different distro on that machine - it's now got Jolli OS (or Jollicloud) on it - I've now got mixed feelings about that, it's lightweight, and geared up towards the 'cloud' but it's not what you'd call fast - particulalry at boot up. So if anyone has a good suggestion for a good distro to get the best out of this device it would be very much appreciate. Inspired by this minor success, I decided that my incredibly slow XP laptop needed a little something, so I tried Ubuntu as a Live USB - worked fine - so I installed it over XP, and it's still running like a dream.
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I bought an Acer Aspire One which had a bl**dy aweful version of Linux on (and I can't even remember it's name in order to warn you off) so when it crashed for the umpteenth time, I unstalled Ubuntu Net Book Remix Edition which ran splendidly, and I put it on my wife's Aspire One (which she only uses for playing games.) 2G less than 2GB when installed, for Asus eee 2G.4G less than 3GB when installed, for Asus eee 4G (701).LXDE light and fast, for all PCs and netbooks. I won't make a recomendation as such - I'll just describe my Linux 'journey'