I’ve been using a Zacate board for several months now. Zacate Asus
For a $120 system where I borrowed ram from another system to get it running, it’s been solid as a linux system. I mostly just used nfs to mount my /home drive and ran the system off a small partition on the hard drive. It’s decent, but it wasn’t great.
I recently installed Windows 8 preview on it using up more of the huge hard drive I had in the system. What a difference solid drivers make. Youtube stuttered and dragged under linux. It ran solid full screen under win8. Most web pages work better under chrome on windows than linux.
Maybe it’s also because linux does poorly with CPU scaling and was sitting at 800mhz the whole time, but it’s actually a solid system that could be used as someone’s main system as long as you don’t want to play really intensive 3d games.
These motherboards are as cheap as $75 now with processor…