Being the fanboy that I am, I wasn't going to let the fact that Apple's unveiling of its new shiny a week ago left me nonplussed stand in the way of an opportunity to take said new shiny out for a test drive.
This time however, I was going to do it the right way. After a crash and burn disaster I experienced with one of the Yosemite betas last year that forced me to wipe everything and reload from scratch (I went into it with my eyes open, so I have no one to blame but myself for loading it onto my main partition), I swore I wasn't going to run any more…at least not off my main drive.
So says the guy who's currently running the 10.10.4 beta as his main OS. (But hey, that's different. Right?)
Anyhow…that being said, at first blush El Capitan is wicked fast; so much faster than Yosemite—even running via USB3.0 on an external SSD. There's none of the screen lag that permeates Yosemite. Safari pages come up instantly. I'm very impressed. It will be interesting to see how the system matures over the next several months.