I've used Fedora with KDE on 1280*800 without any significant problems. It has a dedicated netbook mode, but I just used it like this: http://i.imgur.com/wmzzY.png It's an old screenshot, I don't have that setup now, but you can spot one window of the browser on the right side and see that it's pretty slim height-wise. KDE allows you to get rid of decorations pretty easily or make them small if you want them for certain applications. And I believe that with a bit of work you can make it nice as well.