I have been using the Gutsy Gibbon for a few months now, since one of the first releases. It has actually performed quite well for me, I even ran a Windows XP VMware virtual machine for the
BDFL draft. The biggest issue I have been battling is that I have a widescreen and an ATI graphics card, so I have been doing some editing of my xorg.conf file over the past month to keep both the widescreen display and Compiz-Fusion working. This of course is probably more the fault of ATI than Ubuntu. All that being said, I think this latest release of Ubuntu is going to be fantastic. I am already impressed with the software included with the release. Check it out if you are looking for an operating system to re energize your computer.