I have been using Ubuntu for three years and since then, this operating system has fully been meeting my expectations such as programming, listening to music, watching movies chatting, browsing the web, administrating my remote server, and so on…
However as soon as I use the proprietary Nvidia drivers in order to benefit from Beryl and its great 3D-Desktop effects, the sound drivers ALSA release an error :
[17183700.972000] codec_ready: codec 0 is not ready [0xffffffff]
and the loudspeaker makes awful random sounds !
I will write a report on this issue to the Linux kernel team, so that they fix this bug.
Anyway, this little problem has been interesting, because I tried OpenSuse 10.2, which is a very good Linux distribution as well. The RPM package management is not as good as the Debian system but it worked fine… and Beryl also let the sound server crash !
I am now back to Ubuntu -in 2D though-, I wait for its next release (codename : Feisty Fawn) and I hope the integration of the Nvidia drivers will be better on the next version of the kernel 
PS : This article must not prevent you from using Linux ! Just be sure of what you do and if there is any risk to try something on your operating system and everything will work fine ! Keep also in mind that Beryl has been released as a beta version and is not supposed to be stable !