I have been using Xubuntu for about a year now. I have been using Linux (different flavours) for about 10 years now. I started my first steps with command line installation on a machine with a 150 MHz processor in around 1999. 2010 is a long way from there.
Setup of graphics drivers is seamless, without any intervention from the user. Audio also runs perfectly well. Best thing is all that one can expect from linux and a distro like ubuntu is just under the hood, stripped off the resource hungry eyecandies so that the computer runs very fast. It is very good for students or professionals who need fast computational capabilities & stability rather than eye candy.
The default packages, appearance and settings are good enough for normal usage of browsing, music, movies, and maybe a bit of light computing. For the initiated, its is not difficult to use it for compiling and running third party programs and source codes.
The Xubuntu home page is https://xubuntu.org/The spartan look of the website is a good indication that the operating system is blazing fast
As with all open source software and also as with linux, there is a strong online community for help and troubleshooting, in case you do not have the patience to read the man pages or you cannot find them through internet searches. Finally there is still WINE, which runs almost any such applications. Feature-wise, almost all commercially software that one can think of, there is an open source variant available that will run on linux. sometimes the challenge may be to search for them but usually a post on community forums are very useful.
If one is patient, linux and Xubuntu offers immense potentials in terms of a general purpose computing platform, which otherwise with other operating systems would mean dedicating resources for antivirus, backups, and other non productive activities