I've been using karmic since alpha3 - it's been updated to alpha5 now,
and I love the performance. There are a few glitches, but it's fine for
a backup machine, reading email, listening to music, playing mafia wars
on facebook etc. The onboard intel i945 graphics have never performed
this well before. The compiz cube is snappy, and open arena feels great,
whereas the same machine was unusable with 9.04 because the graphics
were so sluggish.