It should be worth noting that if you run Adobe's Creative Suite (version 6 and below), it has some compatibility problems for a number of users, including me[1] while running it on Mavericks. If your business depends on this software, I would advise you to wait for a few more months until these bugs are fixed. Overall, very excited!

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6538803

It seems the key initiative here is to improve adoption rates which is a sound strategy. As a developer, it's always a pleasure to write apps that only have to support the latest and greatest.

It would be a pretty big feat if the adoption rates for Mavericks came anywhere close to the adoption rates for iOS7.

Installed it on a Mac Mini (3rd gen i7) and after the install it sat on a blank screen (with mouse cursor), but a forced restart and all was perfect and everything is operating brilliantly. Fantastic treat that it is free.

Kernel Caches that aren't cleared properly will do this, the display drivers changes significantly and they're stored in PRAM

That's definitely false. PRAM only contains firmware settings and boot parameters. It isn't big enough to contain drivers.

If the display driver is at fault, grandparent wouldn't even see a mouse cursor.

I don't know anything about 'properly cleaning the kernel caches', but it's clearly not a problem since grandparent was able to continue by rebooting.

PRAM stores a bootarg that boots off the current caches. There's an issue with DMProxy and the display drivers that causes the black screen + cursor issue described. Hardrebooting has the benefit of causing the magic in the EFI to supply a -f (ignore kernelcaches)