Once again, I couldn't resist the urge to stay on the bleeding edge, so I went ahead and updated my home machine from F7 to F8 test 2. Encouraged by the results, I then (again) did the unthinkable and went through the same process on my laptop, which I depend on for getting stuff done. Crazy. Well, that's the way I like to play the game. And I wasn't quite THAT crazy - I didn't upgrade everything, just the parts that I was really happy about. Besides, I've set the laptop up with a whole-system snapshot LVM backup so that I can back up a day if things start to look bad.

They haven't. Apart from a few minor glitches (such as the Rawhide NetworkManager 0.7 really not being at all ready, dealt with by using the F8t2 NM 0.6.5 instead), I really like all the improvements in the usual suspects - GNOME 2.20 is a brilliant incremental update, OpenOffice 2.3 is a slight improvement on the already-improved 2.2 (but damn, are those release notes bad or what), the Power Manager is getting really good at predicting battery life, and (drumroll, please) Evolution has regained its stability! That is major. The "it seems to forgot to include an attachment you mention in the text" feature is a neat little improvement, too, but really, not having e-d-s crash on network events (such as resume in a new WLAN) is the real satisfaction-improvement for me.

One negative about F8: it doesn't include Seahorse 1.0 (as of yet, anyway), so GNOME Keyring integration was a bit lacking. That was easy enough to fix with a rebuilt package, and after switching the old pam_keyring to gnome-keyring-pam, I now have a very good package for dealing with my hundred-and-fourtyseven different daily passwords, too. Well, almost -- still can't really get rid of Revelation and some manual password management, and Epiphany doesn't yet integrate to Keyring. But it's getting there, for sure.