One of the most frustrating things for me in using it was the speed issues that I experienced. It was unbearably slow and even after installing it to a standard laptop I could not deal with the performance issues. Hopefully this gets worked out soon so end users can get a better Netbook OS with the power of Intel behind it.

I just purchased an HP Mini 1010nr which came with WinXP Home, and after testing to make sure the system worked, removed XP.
Nearly a minute to boot is just NOT acceptable, for one thing.

I tested a few good linux distributions and by default, with NO optimization, Debian 5 (Lenny) booted faster and used less disk space. No working wireless though, since the hardware is not entirely Open Source friendly.

I then installed Mepis 8 which is based on Debian Lenny but more amenable to non-open hardware:
Wireless worked out of the box
Boot time was a bit faster than Debian which was a good 10 seconds faster than WinXP.

I have now tried Moblin’s alpha on a USB pendrive, and even this boots faster than Windows, and pendrive booting is not normally all that quick.
The system IS faster and more responsive using Moblin’s Alpha than the installed distro which, again, is faster and more responsive than XP.

There are issues, of course: wireless being a big one, and given the lack of support for linux from so many hardware vendors, these are not always trivial.

But from the appearance and performance of the Moblin ALPHA, if Intel keeps following the path they are on, Moblin will likely develop a large 3rd party user/developer community and have some easy-fix options to deal with the lack of vendor support.
Debian is the same about non-open source hardware, and yet there are many Debian-based distributions (Mepis and Ubuntu for example) that ease the problems.

My opinion could not differ more from yours:
Moblin is big step forward.

Competition is always a good thing and right now Windows 7 is making users happy in the Netbook space. For Moblin to suceed you will really need to have it not only boot fast but look good and give customers things that Windows 7 can’t. Right now projects like Jolicloud and Ubuntu Netbook Remix are visually attractive which will convince your average consumer to buy a Netbook.

In today’s computing age it is about much more than being 1337 and running Linux on your computer.

Please be patient with us during the release process and I hope you’ll try out the beta release (due end of March) for further feedback – also I’d love to know what netbooks you tested the alpha on, so we can look at the performance issues for the next release.

Re: wifi drivers. Moblin is an open-source project, and as such we ship only open-source drivers. Unfortunately some OEMs chose parts (particularly wifi parts) that have incomplete drivers, or drivers/firmware we can’t redistribute, or sometimes even proprietary drivers.

Not this… this is disgusting.