This makes me want to live in Germany. Though it seems amazon.de has a bunch of linux notebooks and netbooks, the same models aren't even on amazon.co.uk. I wonder if amazon.co.uk will even list arm based netbooks when they finally hit full force. The paucity of choice on amazon.co.uk is incredible, mostly older models and mostly out of stock.

When you live in a country in hock to M$* so deeply, maybe it's not surprising.

*The use of M$ in place of Microsoft is and indicator of the many years spent watching Microsoft compete fiercely for their market share, in both a legal and illegal manner.

How about the Amazon mp3 store?

Works as a DAW for me. Realtime kernel, Freebob, Jack, Qjackctl, Ardour. I wouldn't describe my audio work as taxing but it's certainly a capable setup. The only caveat is you probably need to understand more about how it's all plumbed together than on OS-X.

Sure, it's not like Python is an important high level language.

Mono will always be behind .NET. That's the way it works when you are trying to implement what someone else has already implemented. Still Mono is cross platform and is usable if you like large memory footprints, slow startup speed etc. As .NET is Microsoft's reimplementation of Java, having lost their embrace,extend,extinguish route for Java, why bother at all. Why not just use Java. OK Java has many of the same problems as .NET but at least it's not an implementation of someone else's technology.

Of course the alternative is to actually learn to program and use a proper language like C but then you actually need to know what you're doing.

I've used Sparc desktops in the past. I even used one as my main home machine for a while. You could even get Sparc laptops.

In their time they beat the Intel option imo and they are still in use in some places.

I also use Evince.

The only problem I've had was that Royal Mail changed their pdf outputs for online postage so that when viewed they were obscured by the word "Sample" which was supposed to disappear when printed and didn't. My solution was to stop using Royal Mail's online service.

Evince is so much better than Adobe Reader, for my needs.

If you want the holy crap factor, test out xpud. Download the xpud image. Shove it in /boot (or wherever your kernels/initrds live) and add this to /boot/grub/menu.lst (probably right at the bottom)

title xPUD 0.8.9
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/xpud-0.8.9-image noisapnp lang=en quiet

Then reboot and prepare to go holy crap. Then if you're me and running on 3g internet rather than wifi prepare to reboot into Ubuntu.

Maybe you should suggest she gets her schooling in Cuba. She'd come out with no debt, and therefore be able to go away her services free as per your logic. Cuban education establishments are more that willing to take foreign students.