The upper-class students give the school netbooks?
No, I mean shouldn't the more poor people who actually can't afford them get the netbooks, instead of the rich people who could buy one for each member of their family if they wanted.
And, I don't think this thing can handle HL2, it can't even do Hulu or youtube. (Well, I'm not sure, I am a complete Linux noob, I tried to install updates, but it ended up crashing the computer and now I can't get it to work.)
HL2 probably won't be a possibility, but I can't see why Quake or HL1/its mods can't run. Anything that would run on an EEE should run on that.
Also, Ubuntu is one of the more simple Linux distributions out there; if you still feel it is a bit too slow, you can create a liveusb of
Xubuntu and use that in Ubuntu's place. As the name implies, Xubuntu is based off of Ubuntu, but it is more centered toward older/weaker hardware.
And if there's something going on with Ubuntu that you can't seem to understand, there is always Google. Once you get the general idea of how Ubuntu works, you'll be flying through it as if it were Windows.