Why does it only take 15 seconds to boot up... versus the nearly 3 minutes it takes me to load Fedora (my default environment)? And why oh why... does my ext4 partition have to be checked every X number of mounts... what's the point of the journaling? Ughh... do you know how long it takes to verify a 1TB partition?

Anyway, every time I upgrade the OS I loose between 3 hours and 3 months of productivity. When F9 came out it took months for the proprietary nvidia drivers to start working with the X.org 1.5 server... so I stopped upgrading instantly. F10 posed no problems for me so I planned to do a clean install (and get rid of all of the crap left over from years of upgrading through yum... ) of F11 soon after it came out (even jigdoed the DVD and played with the Preview version on VirtualBox) but clean installs suck down even more productivity, so I procrastinated on it for a while...

Last night the update-status icon in the system tray (no clue what program creates that) popped up and asked me if I wanted to update my distribution... so I clicked Yes. It downloaded all the required packages and after a reboot it started the installation procedure... it worked flawlessly. Except I lost 2+ hours because my beta version of KDE didn't work with F11... but that's my fault. I guess I won't be doing a clean install this version =/

Then I lost another hour (or two) because I couldn't find the window decorator theme I like (I had forgotten what it's called)... It has been years since I cared enough to customize the appearance of my computer (beyond a wallpaper) but I really hate the little lines in the titlebar of the default KDE 4 decorator and also how bubbly and 3Dish of the default plasma theme is:

Normally one can use KDE's Get Hot New Stuff to download plasma widgets, desktop wallpapers, and other random stuff through the interface of the control panel itself... but window decorators are actual binaries so they must be installed from source (or RPMs). After about an hour I found the theme on the OpenSUSE site... it's really nice of OpenSUSE to build RPMs for other distros. Anyway the window decorator theme is apparently called Domino and along with the Glassfied plasma theme my environment looks something like this:

Note how much cleaner everything looks.... it's even better with compositing enabled... (these are obviously VirtualBox screenshots and I don't care enough to get compositing working under them)