Upon sitting down at my test machine, inserting the Fedora 11 "Leonidas" LiveCD, and booting to the desktop, I noticed a couple things right away. First, the loading screen is a simple blue loading bar. Second, the boot process is extremely quick. Does the first have anything to do with the second? It sure does. The Fedora 11 development team has decided to go with speed instead of looks during the boot process and I think Fedora 11 users will be thrilled with this small change to speed up the LiveCD boot time. It's not as pretty as previous Fedora loading screens but after booting Fedora half a dozen times, or any other distribution for that matter, does anyone care what they are looking at while their system is booting? If it's a long drawn out boot process you say? What if I told you you'd be looking at your login prompt in under 20 seconds? Not so important now! More on this later.
At the Fedora 11 LiveCD desktop I decided to take a look around and see what applications came pre-installed. As expected in a Fedora release I found a very up-to-date list of available applications; Firefox 3.5 Beta 4, GIMP 2.6.6, Abiword 2.6.8, Rythmbox 0.12.1, and GNOME desktop 2.26.1 are all included.
Satisfied with the look-and-feel of the desktop, speed of the LiveCD system, and available applications, it was time to do my install. After hundreds, if not thousands, of distribution installs. I wish there was something exciting to report about the install procedure but there is not. The most exciting thing I had to do during the Fedora 11 install was enter a root password. The install went smoothly and quickly. Don't get me wrong, such a simple and problem free install is what we want, but it makes for boring writing!
Above when I said the install went smoothly and quickly ... I do mean quickly. I was able to boot the LiveCD, install the system, reboot, and log in to my new system in just under 12 minutes. Fedora 11 has done a wonderful job of streamlining the install process which benefits new and experienced users alike.