Some people using netbooks and the likes, especially suspend to ram resumes, are already used to having a machine come back within a fairly short amount of time, but Ubuntu are challenging the normal Linux desktop boot time and want to push it even further with the first 2010 release of Ubuntu, out in April 2010, Ubuntu 10.04.
The upcoming Linux distribution from Ubuntu, codenamed for the time being 'Karmic Koala+1', aims to beat the currently pretty zippy startup speed of the current release 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) in less than 1 year. Currently 9.04 boots in approximately 25 seconds depending upon your hardware, but Ubuntu wants to aggressively push the envelope and get to a 10 second start up time from cold. Ubuntu were recently praised for significantly reducing startup times in 9.04, after a bit of a feeling of creeping bloat was felt by Ubuntu developers and users alike.
A lot of modern distributions claim to have super-fast startup speeds, but often this figure is pr spin and turns out to mean things like 'actual time to start up the X server', rather than meaning 'actual time to use the desktop'. On that particular point, Scott Remnant of Ubuntu had this to say:
"And just to affirm something we've already stated; this benchmark time
is to a fully logged in desktop (auto-login) with an idle CPU and Disk.
Deferring services is not an option unless done properly (ie. switching
services from startup to on-demand activation)."
Remnant also stated that even though 10 seconds was a good number, he thought that in certain circumstances (enter Intel's platform, Moblin), this figure could even be as low as 5 seconds:
"10s is a good number, especially for a generic, hardware agnostic,
non-stripped down Linux distribution. From that starting point,
development teams will be able to customise and tailor Ubuntu for
specific hardware - and the OEM team will be able to produce custom
Remixes of Ubuntu that boot even faster.
I think it likely that we'll match Moblin's 5s benchmark on similar
hardware, with a device-tailored Moblin-based remix of Ubuntu."
I guess it's just another reason to choose a Linux (in this case Ubuntu) Desktop. Even the fastest Mac or Vista machine won't boot to a usable desktop in anything like 5-10 seconds.
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