How's the Dell Inspiron Mini 1012 with recent Linux/X.Org?

[reddragdiva]

arkady's Dell 1012 netbook (Atom N450 CPU, NM10 chipset) has been a nightmare since Ubuntu 10.10 support ended.

Ubuntu 12.04 has a kernel-oopsing Bluetooth bug introduced by Canonical, and 12.10 has a terrible tendency to run fine for a while then go nuts, have all its CPU taken by ... something ... then overheat and shut down.

So I thought, "let's get back to base: Debian." I put Wheezy on with LXDE. Which is nothing like as awful as I've been told, even if bits of the interface tell you to look up man 3 strftime (seriously, that's what LXDE tells you to do if you want your clock to show seconds). Debian remains a piquant blend of 2012 and 1993. Trouble is, it started doing the "go nuts, CPU locked up, die" thing as well.

(By default, Debian Wheezy boots into GNOME 3, which is so superlatively intuitive I literally couldn't figure out how to start an application. The only thing I could do was shut it down. With great pleasure.)

So I took it back to Ubuntu 10.04, which is supported until 2015, and everything is usable now, thanks (even if bits are the Museum of Old Software). Although Arkady is actually using the monster truck gaming laptop for daily work. But the netbook makes a lovely portable and non-fragile video player for Freda.

(Man, Ubuntu GNOME 2 is just so damn easy to use. I really hope MATE can attract a critical mass of developers.)

My question is: do you have a Dell 1012 running a recent Linux of any distro, and have you seen anything like the above pathological behaviour?