Well, just another anecdote in the mix here, really.

I ran the 9.10 RC in virtualbox for a little over a week before the release, and was pretty happy with it overall. That still wouldn't have told me everything I needed to know, but I know from experience that I should expect problems with the nvidia and intel 4965 drivers, and I have always had to ditch PulseAudio (which I have railed against including as default) and I hate Network Manager. For reference, this is on an ASUS G1S laptop with a retrofit Seagate Momentus 7400 hd running ext4 on all partitions.

So I waited for the weekend after the 9.10 release to install. I get a 3-day weekend, which should be enough for anybody to recover from a botched OS upgrade even with dumb partitioning (and mine should be fine). The upgrade went off in around an hour with no trouble. I was somewhat shocked that I had no problem with DKMS handling the nvidia driver install, although, as expected, I had to plug in a CAT5 for a couple of minutes to uninstall Network Manager and install wicd (which is just in my experience completely superior anyway).

I was stunned to realize after a couple of days that I still hadn't uninstalled PulseAudio. Several days on, and it's still running, and still behaving itself. I don't do any serious audio work on this machine as it's a laptop for programming and not an audio workstation so I can't speak to latency but for the first time in my experience it's actually performing as advertised. My wifi worked out of the box and so do all of my ASUS LEDs.

The desktop layout is solid, things look good, and to me the menu setup in Gnome makes a hell of a lot more sense than in recent Windows and Mac machines I've used (flameproof undies on--I admit I have more experience in Gnome than in Windows or Mac so take that for what it's worth).

Now, all that said (I sound pretty happy so far, yes?) I offer these caveats:

- The generic-pae kernel completely refuses to boot to the desktop. Haven't really looked into it yet since I only have (and only need at this point) 2GB RAM--but it was the default kernel so I rewrote menu.lst to make the non-pae kernel the default and am quite happy for the moment running 2.6.31-14-generic. I suspect it's simply a matter of properly setting up the nvidia driver to work with it but am waiting for the weekend to work on that.
- This upgrade would have sent my folks running. They would have no idea how to edit menu.lst, no clue to plug in the CAT5 and do 'apt-get remove network-manager; apt-get install wicd', and so on.
- For some reason, the 'disable touchpad' button no longer works--it worked out of the box on 9.04.

Overall, I would count myself as happy with the upgrade. If I had less experience running Linux (I've run several distros since about 1994 or so) I would likely be less happy. I just want a distro which gets me up and running with my tools and, where possible, my eye candy--and this worked perfectly for that. Aside from ditching Network Manager and swapping the default boot kernel, I have everything I want so far and the Compiz bling is turned up to 11 and working fine. I even (so far) have been able to skip the whole 'disable Pulse' step, since for a change it actually seems to be working.

So: Grandma-ready? No. But ready to be packaged and given to Grandma to use (without the root password)? Quite possibly.

Just some thoughts.

Complaining to Kai-lan about something, presumably. And wearing panda slippers.

*sigh* Yes, my 2-year-old kid watches entirely too much TV.

No, the poster just forgot a hyphen. Try reading it as ". . .resurrected Jesus-like character. . ." and it makes sense.

Torben

Um, no. That's nonsense. LEDs work just fine on DC, and that's the most common way to power them. In the simplest case, you just use a properly calculated current-limiting resistor as a current source, but any current source with the right output will work. For more complex needs (dimming, colour blending, etc) you can modulate them quite easily while keeping the pulses well above what the human eye can discern. You are alluding to that in the last sentence of your post, but a 10% duty cycle at 10kHz is DC, not AC (unless you're swinging both ways for some reason).

It's less common to run them off AC but as long as your circuit takes the negative supply swing into account you can do it. This is how (at least some) holiday LED strings work.