So I decided to install Ubuntu 12.10 on my wife's old Lenovo. It was running Vista and was slooooooooowwwww...
Install went very smoothly. Impressively smoothly, really. Basically just booted up from a USB stick, played around for a bit running off USB to make sure everything worked, and then did the install. No errors, no warnings. Everything seems to work just fine...
Almost.
My problem is with the "Dash Home" thing. It seems to work just fine when I first boot up, but after I'm running for a while I'll go in and several of the icons will be blank. You can see an empty square where the icon should be, and you can still click it and it works, but you can't see it. Sometimes closing and opening Dash will fix this, but most times not. Also, I've had the machine freeze up on my a few times, always when I'm in Dash.
I am considering just dropping Unity and going to GNOME, but before I do that (I am a Linux n00b) I wanted to see if anyone has seen the same sorts of problems and might have a suggestion for a fix. The last time I ventured into Ubuntu world it was a few versions ago, and I think GNOME was the default then...
On a side note, a few years back my venture into Ubuntu world I was left with the impression that it was still more or less a play thing... with this new version, I am honestly impressed. Everything seems to work. No problems with graphics (aside from the above) or networking or the touch-pad - and all three of those things were issues at one time or another in Windows. I had to run a console command to install a plug-in for the built-in VPN to connect to my work network, but even that works flawlessly now.