alt Hacker NewsSimilar but with a 16mb usb drive for my settings and apps.
Ran pretty well since I only used an msn clone, web browser, occasional types assignment and some Winamp clone. Had an an external hdd for my media do it covered everything and just worked.
Boot times didn’t matter cuz it was so stable.
I quickly learned to symlink certain things (usually the least-updated ones) to folders in $HOME, and put together some bash scripting to copy stuff back and forth. By the time I had a replacement disk I was already somewhat fluent. And yeah, hardly ever had to reboot, only when doing radical changes in setup. I remember I was using windowmaker instead of the default KDE 3 after a while, although I don't quite remember the thought process that led me to it.