Not until distros start shipping it. I don't know about Ubuntu because I don't really use it, but Fedora's still shipping with 1.8 and Fedora 14 will only be released in November.
At this point as a Rubyist the only thing you really need is rubygems (of any version) on your computer. gem install rvm and then rvm install RUBY_VERSION.
indeed. I stopped worrying about native system ruby version since moving to rvm. it is almost the only way to keep you sane while dealing with distros and ruby versions.
What's the best way to get rubygems with no other ruby packages on my system? Package manager, or dl and compile it?
My package manager wants to install ruby, irb, and a couple other 1.9.1 packages with it that I'm not sure I'll want after using rvm to install the 1.9.2 versions.
Go with whatever your distro provides as a default. RVM completely segregates your RVM Rubies from your system Ruby, so you're far better off with a "common" system Ruby install than you are trying to hack together a stripped down Ruby install. The package maintainers already know the platform specific idiosyncrasies you'll need to work around, so might as well leverage that. You may also encounter other software that expects a certain system Ruby environment on your system, so there's that too.
People still use Ruby packages from their Linux distribution? I've always compiled, especially since Debian cripples RubyGems. Either that or I use ArchLinux, which uses the actual stable version of the software.
I would speculate that anyone doing any real work in Ruby doesn't wait on the distro to provide it. I don't do that with Perl, I compile my own. I would imagine Rubyists are the same way too. Anyway, kudos to the Ruby folks.
Off-topic, but have you tried Gugod's Perlbrew for handling multiple Perl interpreters? It's like rvm, but for Perl. I've been using it for a bit with great results.
When I tried it (earlier this year), it wasn't quite like RVM. RVM is very versatile, powerful and polished. Perlbrew is getting there, but seems good only for particular limited ranges of use. Things I got used to with RVM weren't ready yet in Perlbrew. Various Perl versions wouldn't compile for me successfully. You can also compare the Synopsis of Perlbrew with the range of rvm commands and switches to get a feel for how much is missing in Perlbrew. I really wish Perlbrew gave me a good out-of-the-box experience, because it would be very handy for me, but that wasn't the case.
The most popular way (and easy, really) has always been to curl and compile yourself.
And these days RVM is growing up on production servers too, because it's really convenient if you have many apps each with the exact version it requires.
If it was any software but Ruby, I'd agree with you, but Rubyists tend to be into the cutting edge, as well as not using package managers to install Ruby. The conventional wisdom (at least for Ubuntu) has been "don't use apt, compile your own" for a while now. Or even better, use rvm.
Mr. Katz advised in multiple interviews/tweets (if I recall correctly) to wait for 1.9.2, and the community tends to listen. Rails 3 was tested against 1.9.2, not 1.9.1; this provided yet another reason to wait.
To add a few more details, it wasn't until 1.9.1 was out that "normal" people really started to look at it. There were quite a few changes that took time to be properly absorbed by the community (e.g. Internationalisation, see James Edwards Gray's blog).
Most gems also only started then to consider 1.9.1 as one of their targets, but it took some time. And anyway Rails was moving even more slowly.
Personally I've been using 1.9.1 for about a year now, but I don't make a living out of Ruby (or Rails) so it's understandable that people who need more reliable support waited a bit.
I can't speak for _everybody_, but I'm waiting to upgrade all of my sites that use Rails until Ruby 1.9.2 and Rails 3 both came out. I don't want to do two large updates, I'd rather do them together, and Rails 3 didn't support Ruby 1.9.1.
Also, there's just general conservatism; Ruby 1.9 was originally Ruby 2.0, but got renamed to 1.9 for reasons I don't quite remember/understand. 1.8 -> 1.9 is a much larger transition than the scheme would imply, roughly equivalent to the Python 2.6 -> 3 change, and we've seen how well that's gone. As time progresses, more people switch over, and each new release makes people decide it's finally time to re-write their scripts.
This is really exciting.