I'm a big fan of Macs with quite a collection of them now. However, recently I've been playing with a netbook running Ubuntu and been very impressed with it. It seems very user friendly and reliable with the only caveat being that the very recent update to 11.04 has broken a few things, so with hindsight I'd go with 10.10 or wait for the v11 updates to filter through.
I'd suggest before writing off the Linux route why not try a live CD version of Ubunti?