While most things ran absolutely fine, Firefox ran like crap, which really makes you realise how awful the modern web is.
When I got the netbook I had dreams of hacking in Emacs wherever I went. The tiny keyboard makes that quite uncomfortable, though. So it was only really used as a music player and web browser while traveling a few times, basically what you'd use a phone for today.
In the early/mid 2000s, we used to buy computers, install Linux and then ask Dell etc. to refund the Windows license, which often worked.
My girlfriend at the time got a Dell desktop really cheap that way. IIRC it cost something like 400 or 500 Euro and Dell refunded ~100 Euro for not using the Windows license. I never really understood the economics, because installing Windows was probably profitable for them due to the adware shipped with Windows.
Probably it was easier/better for them to just give a refund to noisy Linux users than to admit that they were making big bucks on all the crap shipped with the Windows installation.
As an aside, at the time a lot of HP laptops could be purchased with FreeDOS and I think Lenovo was similar.