From the boot menu, you get to choose from a selection of desktop configurations, from bare bones to a design for netbooks, as well as an overall theme. Less than a second later, everything is configured.
This speed and minimalism come from a desktop called Enlightenment. Bodhi is one of a new breed of distributions that opt for its efficiency and minimalism over the perceived bloat of KDE and Gnome. As a result, Bodhi has modest system requirements without sacrificing features.
The Midori web browser, for instance, is very quick, and because it's built on WebKit, it can render the vast majority of sites to the same standard as Chrome and Safari. General applications also boot quicker due to the distribution's low memory footprint, and the desktop doesn't try to do anything clever.
You can't tell by looking at it, but Bodhi is built on Ubuntu, so you have access to the same broad selection of packages. There's also a good selection of packages that can be installed with a single click from the web browser. Just point it at this site and click 'Install' - Bodhi will handle the rest. This even works from the live CD.
Due to its Ubuntu foundations, making a permanent installation is also simple, and there's excellent hardware compatibility. Just click on the 'Install' icon in the toolbar and answer the few remaining questions. It normally takes less than 10 minutes to go from clicking the icon to a full-blown installation, so there are no excuses if you're looking for the ultimate speed upgrade to your Linux distribution.