Isn't AMD support good enough these days ? I got Ubuntu (10.10 or 11.04, early Unity, was very klunky, dropped it because of that) to dual screen on an E350 nettop w/o too much hassle, and everything else seemed to be working too (ethernet, wifi, usb, sound). I think Brazos netbooks are rather competitive with Atom, with a much better GPU, a similar CPU (no parallel threading though ?), but a bit higher power consumption ?
Warning: I did *not* test ACPI or whatever power management is called these days. Wifi is a separate chip so check that your specific model is supported. Ditto for sound, surely. But both of those don't seem to be raising lots of issues these days.
More info:
some perf graphs here:
http://www.blogeee.net/2011/08/amd-e-45 ... formances/ (sorry, in French, his conclusion is: AMD kills the Atom).
in another article the guy quite likes the Acer Apire One 522 and 722 (10.1" vs 11.6"), esp. screen.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLi ... 0Processor. RAM seems to be upgradeable only on the larger one, but I'd double check, I've read the smaller one is (was ?) upgradeable too.
EDIT: googling for Acer Aspire One 722 Linux (
https://www.google.com/search?client=op ... +722+linux) seems to confirm it works, but requires some tweaking of the wifi config.