- It's a minimal Debian. I have a good idea of the installed packages on my system. Very few surprises.
- Openbox is great. I cannot ever imagine myself going back to GNOME/KDE/Unity/XFCE and all these "desktop environments".
- #! looks great. The theme, the icons, the fonts, ... Very good work is made for this. A special effort has been put on proper and pretty compositing.
- cb-welcome script is run the first time you login a non-liveCD session. It lets you configure your install nicely.
What I dislike:
There's only one thing I dislike about this distribution. It includes some questionable apps by default (like GIMP or Abiword). This wouldn't be a problem, except that ever since the latest 2 releases, the size of the iso has risen above 700MB and won't fit on a CD anymore.
Who should try it:
Everybody can try it, but you should know what you're stepping into. I recommend it strongly for people who enjoy minimalism and control over shiny magic. As far as skill level go, there's nothing inherently difficult about using #!, but I think it will be more appealing to people already familiar with Debian.
My rule of thumb is that if you know how to manage your sources.list file (and you understand the difference between running Sid or Stable+backports) then you're good to go.
Shameless plug: I have written a more extensive review of the first build of #! 11. You can find it here: http://www.tech-thoughts-blog.com/2012/05/first-builds-of-ne... Keep in mind that the distro has had one year + to mature since.