I've been on FC 11 for over a week now. The more I get to know it, the more I love it.

Last time, I left you with the initial re-boot to my new FC11 installation. This thing impressed me right off the bat: It is quick. RedHat has been working on the problem of bloat, and they have done a fine job of it. On my machine FC11 boots in something like 30 seconds, and that includes the initial screens before the bootloader even starts. The boot-up after the Grub screen is lightning fast. At first I thought there must have been some kind of error. Nope -- it's intentional. ("Less than 30 seconds" might not sound like much of an achievement, but when you consider all the things that happen -- filesystem checks, hardware hotplugs, three entirely different desktop environments to load, daemons to fire up -- to boot up a stable and powerful OS like Linux, it's impressive.)

OK so I boot up and log in. The first thing I notice is that... I don't notice much. The programs that were on the panel in FC9 are still there. The same desktop icons and clutter are still there. The Gnome graphics have changed slightly and are a bit smoother looking, and I've lost my custom eye candy (the colors, fonts and panel behaviors). But all the stuff that matters looks basically the same.

I get a notice informing me of important security updates which I make immediately. Those happen in the background as I work. SELinux deflects a few intrusion attempts. No biggie.

Crossing my fingers, I fire up my e-mail client of choice (Yes, Linux gives me numerous choices here, including Outlook if I really wanted to use a piece of shit like that), Evolution. To my astonishment, my inbox is still there. My address book is in perfect working order. I start Firefox which updates to the latest version. My add-ons are gone, but my bookmarks are still there. My stored passwords are still stored. My master password needs to be reset. No biggie.

I open up some heavy programs and, just for fun, take a peep at the system monitor. I had to rub my eyes and do a double take because I couldn't believe what I was seeing.

(I should mention that the image you see here is not the actual one I'm referring to -- it's the one I just took as I wrote this.) The system monitor in the first test was started with several big programs (The Gimp, Ardour, Firefox, OOImpress) active. On CentOS or earlier versions of Fedora I would have expected to see CPU 1 at 90 percent, CPU 2 at maybe 15 percent, and memory being mostly used up, plus some swap. On FC 11 I saw both CPUs at around 35 percent, memory barely touched. It blew me away. No wonder everything seemed so much speedier!

So the Fedora project got the bloat issue under control which is an incredible feat. The programs are bigger and badder than ever, but everything runs smooth as silk with all the performance enhancements.

Next up came installing some packages that were lost in the upgrade. Most dreaded of all was the AV stuff because that involves grabbing non-free codecs to play proprietary formats like .mp3. There is always some tweaking there, right? Nope. Everything I needed was right there in the standard repositories plus FreshRPMs. The only thing that didn't cooperate fully was CCRMA. Apparently it's not ready for FC11 yet, but most of the packages bundled with it are. The only thing I miss is the low-latency kernel -- that thing is wicked. You haven't heard music until you've heard it through that incredible technology. It's like being right in Muddy Waters' ribcage, so close to his heart that you can hear it beating time. I'm willing to wait.

The video editing installations were easy as pie for once. Even Cinelerra came off without a hitch. Now I can finally start using it. I've heard such great things about it but have never gotten it to work properly until now.

It looks like they finally got PulseAudio working the way it should too which is huge for me.

OpenOffice has matured nicely. I don't think that inferior commercial office product can compete in any way, shape or form now. It's also a lot less of a resource hog on FC11 than it was on CentOS or FC9.

Are there bugs? Yeah, a few tiny, non-blood-sucking ones. I had to restorecon one file because SELinux was complaining about it. Just a header typo on the part of the programmer. ClamAV keeps telling me that the virus definitions aren't up to date, but they are. Freshclam confirms it. Since I don't run a mail server, I'm not going to worry about that one. I feel pretty secure, and that's not normal for me.

The whole thing has been impressive, from the upgrade process to the way beefy, feature-rich software runs as speedily as your favorite command line tools. I haven't even started to trick out my desktop. That should be pretty sweet. I think I'm going to make it look just like a Mac this time. I'll post a screenshot in the next few days.