My reasoning behind the intention of going with gold was that the fuller version would more likely have everything needful already included and would therefore require less mandatory dialing in. If the light verson does the job just as easily I'll go with less bloat thank you.
I'm primarily a VL6 Standard Deluxe user, but I installed VL 6 Light on a 4-gig partition I hope to use for packaging. If you're planning to use your Aspire primarily for browsing and e-mail, Light out of the box has Firefox, Opera, and two lighter browsers. Opera includes an e-mail client that I've been using on all my computers (Linux and Windows) for years. You could add Thunderbird or Sylpheed from the repos if you want them instead of Opera. The browsers in Light already have Flash, Java, and mplayer-plugin and there's XPDF included. You could remove Opera and/or Firefox and install SeaMonkey from the repos for another all-in-one solution. SeaMonkey's e-mail client is similar to Thunderbird.
Light has players for music and DVDs, a lightweight burning application, and GQview for viewing and cataloguing photos. Siag Office is pretty weak, but it does have a minimalist word processor and spreadsheet.
IceWM is the default window manager. It has a lighter footprint than XFce, but is quite configurable and has lots of possibilities. I was impressed! JWM is even lighter. I am quite impressed by Light and if I had a netbook, I would certainly put VL Light on it. You can make it into whatever you want, but if you're trying to avoid big downloads from the repos, I think there is enough in the ISO to provide for most of what you need and would likely be doing on a netbook.
--GrannyGeek
