Installing it was trivial, thankfully all of its dependancies exist in Portage, so as a Gentoo user I only had to issue a few commands.

emerge -u dev-dotnet/mono x11-libs/gtk-sharp
emerge -u media-libs/libexif dev-db/sqlite
tar xvjf f-spot-0.0.1.tar.bz2
cd f-spot-0.0.1
./configure --prefix=/home/david/test
make
make install
~/test/bin/f-spot

This put it in a nice location from which it is easy to delete after testing.

My inital impression was good, it runs quickly, and never appeared to be hanging around doing nothing (i.e. progress bars made progress). It features the essential tools for dealing with digital photographs, that of cropping (with a wonderful constraint feature so you can ensure your crops are of suitable ratios) and rotating.

I won't list the problems with it (it certainly isn't ready for production use), since this is a 0.0.1 release and I haven't found anything I want which isn't already on the TODO list.

It's going to be a great piece of software, and its impressed me enough that I might actually get around to learning C#/Mono.