Does Fedora 11 boot as fast as promised? I decided to do a simple test to find out. I shut down my Fedora 11 test machine, fired up a simple stop-watch on my iMac and put this lofty goal to the test. I started the stop-watch at the boot prompt and stopped it at the gnome login screen. The result? Just over 18 seconds ... Compare this to Fedora 10 and it's 30 second boot time, which in my experience it rarely made, and all I can say is that they've done a wonderful job "trimming the fat" to get the boot time of Fedora 11 down to under 20 seconds. Will all users boot in 18 seconds? Of course not, this will depend on the machine, but I would expect a sub 20 second boot time on most modern machines.
Still a little stunned at the 18 second boot time I decided to take Fedora 11 for a test drive. I setup my Fedora 11 system as I would any system; installing updates, making changes to the GUI (Graphical User Interface) to fit my personal tastes, and installing additional software (covered in the next several sections). During this process of getting my Fedora 11 system just how I like it, there are two things to note. I didn't experience a single crash and not once was I forced to open a terminal window to accomplish any of my tasks. No crashes during this process is certainly a good thing but what surprised me was how user-friendly Fedora 11 is. Fedora is notorious for being one of those distributions where you have to have some command line knowledge in order to get things working properly. Not long ago I recommended Fedora to users who wanted more of a challenge, but with the release of Fedora 11, an update may be in store for the article. Fedora 11 may not be quite as easy to use as distributions such as Ubuntu and Mandriva, but during my use of the system it came darn close. The combination of Gnome Package Manager and PackageKit make installing and maintaining software on a Fedora 11 based system a breeze and I would not hesitate to recommend Fedora 11 to new users.