[dundee] TuxRadar - The Great Boot Race

[Rick Moynihan]

2009/11/2 Andrew Clayton <andrew at digital-domain.net>:
> On Mon, 2 Nov 2009 21:47:06 +0000, gordon dunlop wrote:
>> TuxRadar videoed four different 64-bit systems to see which booted up
>> fasted: Vista, Windows7, Ubuntu 9.04 & Ubuntu 9.10
>>
>> http://tuxradar.com/content/vista-windows-7-ubuntu-904-and-910-boot-speed-comparison
>>
>> Gordon
>
> One question is: What is the definition of booted up?. For me, I'd say
> say sitting at a terminal with idle cpu and disk.
>
> No dirty tricks like loading X/desktop early and then doing a load of
> stuff in the background. I'm not saying Ubuntu does this, but then
> again they well might, if I remember reading correctly. I'm sure Windows
> is not above this kind of kludge either.

Good point, and well worth a more detailed look!

However I wouldn't consider the tricks dirty...  The test showed them
all booting up and loading a web page in a web browser, which implies
that you can be up and running doing something useful quicker with
Ubuntu than Windows.  If the machine is going to spend another 20
seconds doing something in the background, but still be useful for the
majority of tasks (if a bit slower) then it seems like a trade off
that's worth making.

Parallelising bits of the startup process seems like it's going to
bring more advantages when we're running those 100 core CPU's Gordon
mentioned.

Despite the benefits of hibernate etc... I think boot times are still
an important perception...  For example my Dad's old laptop running XP
takes a fair bit over 5 minutes to boot and be usable (thanks to
antivirus and low system specs...)  After months of complaining I gave
him a copy of Xubuntu 9.04 and he found that it would be up and
running Firefox from the livecd(!!!!) quicker than Windows booting
from the HD would...  This and the fact that Ubuntu's wireless
connection is always rocksolid where as XP's is incredibly unreliable
means that he's now finally installed it dual boot, which means it
boots way quicker than Windows, and he's loading Windows less and
less.

Free Software FTW!

R.