I haven't had many problems with Karmic Koala suprisingly. My processor is an AMD Athlon64 X2 Dual Core 5200+ (2.61Ghz). I am running the 64bit edition of the desktop version. I upgraded from 9.04 8 days before the release and was having kernel problems complaining about Non-ECC RAM on my Gigabyte motherboard. But that's been fixed, or hasn't occured since the few patches after the release. Pulse-audio (sound blaster audigy live pci sound card) was crashing randomly but that's seemed to be fixed with the new patches also. I'm running SLIed Nvidia 7900 GS video cards with the newest 190 release of the Nvidia Driver with Coolbits enabled (one card has a slightly faster clock/256mb of vram and the other has 512 mb vram). The video processing is excellent and haven't had any problems with that. The boot up is faster and the system runs flawlessly except (I think because I only have a 1gb of 667 DDR2 ram) when I load too many pages on firefox the system grays out and I have to wait a while to watch multiple videos at the same time. The other thing I have noticed which is quite annoying is that my hard drive transfers to NTFS and to SD Cards and sometimes even with the same linux partition takes forever compared to the older versions. I have no idea why this is since I have a 500GB SATA harddrive with linux running on a 100gb partition. Also USB connections seem to go on and off randomly (HTC T-mobile G1 especially). After I had installed it on my main computer, i installed it on my media pc (connected to my living room tv). I originally avoided upgrading my slower pc to the newer ubuntu (was still 8.04) versions because I had a Radeon 9800 and ATI stopped producing drivers. I really only needed it for media purposes. Surpisingly the new kernel and 9.10 on it, it actually performs better with the new kernel included "radeon" driver. It only has 1.5gb of ram and is running an Athlon XP 1.8 Ghz core and it works perfectly and boots way faster. I did an upgrade even though I was going to install ext4 and reformat the harddrive but I haven't got around to that yet. For some reason, I haven't had any of the hard drive problems with this desktop with the older ide drive. I even upgraded this while connected via WIFI - took a while but worked perfectly.

My school wasn't exactly linux friendly. I was going to Penn State Delaware County/Media Campus. However, to log in to the network, all that was needed was your previously set up student Id and password and connect via vpn which was trivial with my linux laptop. Non of the desktops had linux because it would've overridden their security. For my first year IST class, I brought in a linux boot disk for my teacher to show the class a linux desktop. While the desktop was fully connected to the network, there was no need for any credentials when running a boot disk. That is my guess as to why the school didn't have a permanent linux setup. I also had the same problem at my high school. The network administration realized how powerful to intelligent kids with a linux box would be on the network especially considering how easy it was for us to get root even though he changed it ten times. So he wouldn't allow us any network access with our linux box. So at least you can connect to the WAN with linux as long as you know what your doing at PSU.