I've been a Gnome user since the pre-October Gnome days and I booted Fedore 15 for about 5 minutes before shutting it down.
Since then I have tried XFCE and KDE and I'm still running KDE on my new sandy bridge (not my everyday box yet).
I remembered the other night about the reception for Gnome 2 and it was not pretty.
Anywho, I just booted Fedora 16 and it's not so bad, I'm gonna run it on this little Atom for awhile and see if it grows on me.
He likes it! Hey Mikey!

I tried the OpenMoko, too. Ended up getting an N900 and it's much better for an everyday phone.
Wish I could get an N950, but I'm not that serious of a dev for that platform.

Somewhat of a spoiler, but you should read A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge.
Highly recommended.

What we learn from history is that we do not learn from history.
Benjamin Disraeli

I just bought a fit-PC2 (linux) with semi-intentions to do what you're wanting to do. It's pretty nice, I've been booting from USB into fedora 11 but haven't got the poulsbo chipset video working, yet. Of all the gadgets I have fooled with (not a large number) this one installs 'normal' linux distros much better, except for the video driver (google poulsbo). It draws 8w max when it's bttw and you can get one for just over US$300 at amazon.