I'm sure experiences vary greatly depending on the mix of hardware. I remember having to tweak some things to get bumblebee to work properly (or maybe I had to recompile from the source) but it's worked flawlessly since. This is on Ubuntu 12.04.
pkolaczk does bring up a good issue about the DisplayPort not working properly though. I don't use an external display on my laptop and have never played with that.
On another note, I remember installing 12.10 on my desktop right around the time it came out. My desktop has a Radeon HD3870 video card which was completely incompatible with Unity. I don't remember the issue exactly but my choice was either to use the open source drivers or have the desktop environment fail to show at all with ATI's drivers. I just did a search and I guess the fix is to downgrade X-Server and install a legacy driver. It's a shame something as central to the user experience as GUI performance still doesn't work out of the box or worse yet, critically breaks on an upgrade.
pkolaczk does bring up a good issue about the DisplayPort not working properly though. I don't use an external display on my laptop and have never played with that.
On another note, I remember installing 12.10 on my desktop right around the time it came out. My desktop has a Radeon HD3870 video card which was completely incompatible with Unity. I don't remember the issue exactly but my choice was either to use the open source drivers or have the desktop environment fail to show at all with ATI's drivers. I just did a search and I guess the fix is to downgrade X-Server and install a legacy driver. It's a shame something as central to the user experience as GUI performance still doesn't work out of the box or worse yet, critically breaks on an upgrade.