I just installed Fedora 9 preview on my laptop. Initial impressions:

• Even more pretty. Their customisation of gdm continues to improve. It's also great that a limited interface to the power manager is available before login.
• It boots faster - not super-interesting to me because I don't reboot very often, but if I used my laptop more like most people do, I'm sure this would be great.
• Perl 5.10 is nice. Will play with this more later
• Fonts are different again - made progress in making things look like they did before by telling gnome-terminal to use a font size of 6 (which is apparently the same as what font size 8 used to be). A lot of people find the fonts I use unreadably small...
• Firefox 3's default linux theme is incredibly ugly. I was hoping for one close to the Windows Firefox 3 theme, but instead I get something with huge fonts, weird dropdown arrows, and ugly icons. I'll have to look around for a better theme - hopefully after Firefox 3 is officially released, I'll have more choices.
• As before, if I don't disable the trackpad with i8042.noaux, heavy CPU usage causes the mouse and/or keyboard to insert random garbage or randomly stop working. This is apparently not a rare problem, and I've sometimes even seen it on windows laptops. I don't understand how something like this could be so common - it's about as equally stupid as there not being a small set of standard laptop power adapters. I wonder if it's something so simple as inadequate buffering between the actual devices and the 8042 controller causing disasters when interrupt latency occurs.
• The default fedora settings are a bit more obnoxious and windows-y with regards to sound, making noises whenever users interact with GTK widgets. Ugh (but easily disabled)
• There were options for encrypted filesystems and resizing partitions in the installer, which I'm sure will excite some people. There was also a flag I could've passed to the installer to allow me to install onto ext4, with this option invisible by default because fsck, debugfs, and other useful tools arn't ready.
• I need to read up on "upstart", which replaces a lot of SysV init stuff.
• The option to not do SELinux was removed from the installer. system-config-selinux was able to tell it to turn that stuff off though.
• I finally decided to stop sticking all my music and stuff in /media, and put them in ~media instead. /media is used by Fedora (and some other Linuces) for automounted devices, a practice they started well after I had been using /media to hold music, movies, and other stuff. Sigh. I guess it's nice to make /home a huge partition that holds all that stuff though - copying stuff from machine-to-machine won't be as painful if I preserve that partition.
• The external repositories (like Livna) for illegal-but-useful software (like mplayer) arn't yet packaged in a way as to be a no-brainer for use with Fedora9. Hopefully this will change soon, but in the meantime some manual tweaking to use the versions tracking Rawhide (the unversioned continual development branch of Fedora) worked fine.
• I'm not sure if pulseaudio is worth running or not. Why is it that every few years, somebody writes yet another abstraction layer around the sound devices, some of which sit on top of other abstraction layers? Sigh. Was ARtS not good enough? esd? Directly talking to ALSA or OSS? What about NAS (not that NAS, the other one)? JACK? Is /dev/audio still a useful interface to have? I suppose when people write OS-independent abstraction layers (like SDL, which I think is probably the sanest choice for people who would write games and maybe other applications that want to be crossplatform with a Linux focus), it's more forgivable to do another abstraction layer, but otherwise it's kind of ridiculous.
• I had to install a package called xorg-x11-xinit-session in order for my .xsession to be respected. I feel kind of sad that the description for that package describes the .xsession mechanism of being legacy.