I'm surprised the article doesn't mention Fedora's boot time. Fedora already has 20 seconds (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/20SecondStartup) and their last release was 30 seconds. So I guess they've got a head-start

For me, Ubuntu 9.04 already boots in under 20 seconds. I'm at the login screen 18 seconds after pushing the power button (so that includes the time BIOS still has control). I'm using a pretty low-end laptop.

Clueless help-desk techs often count "boot time" as the time it takes for you to boot, then log into your account. Then when you follow their instructions and call them back "after it boots" they get irate at you for making them wait another few seconds.

They may have a small head start. The article also doesn't mention what the boot time is for the current 9.10 build of Ubuntu.

Steve Jobs would be pleased:

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...

Since Ubuntu wants to become the one true desktop distribution, or so it seems, they should focus more on usability and improving user interface because to be honest as long as it boots faster than windows xp (excluding a fresh install) they should be fine.

Overall I agree with you, but usability and user interface don't do anything for someone who doesn't even consider using Ubuntu. Boot time is one of those things that, if you get it beyond a certain threshold of speed, can really jump out and grab someone's attention. For those people who power down their computers and start them up again for whatever reason, it'll be extremely noticeable every single time, both when they start up their own 10.04 machines, and when they go to non-10.04 machines that start up way more slowly. This seems like one of those things that will serve a specific group of people very very well, and doesn't hurt for everyone else. As long as they're not sacrificing too much effort for this, it seems like it could be a good use of effort.

In the land of laptops, powering down is a lot less frequent. Vista's "power button" by default suspends. The hardware power button suspends. I suspect a lot of Windows users almost never reboot.

it's truer in osx. i never booted my iBookG4 except for updates.

the more important is the sleeping wake up time. in mac, you can just close it, travel half the world, open it and instantly everything works(tm) just like nothing happened

it seems ubuntu again is copying the wrong model. reboot is sooooo microsoftie, solving it is like premature optimization.

I can see how this would be a god-send to people who might spend a lot of time messing around with VMs. Those users probably fall under your case.

I certainly won't complain about faster boot times, but it seems like an odd thing to focus on for the netbook market. Do people really power down netbooks instead of just suspending them?

it's good for the environment ;) . I always power down my notebook at night.

This will vastly improve the usability of LiveCDs.

Live CDs will still boot slower than full installs, because accessing the CD is a lot slower than accessing the HDD. I'm wondering whether the boot time for Live CDs will be fast enough to avoid displaying the progress bar, or whether they will have to boot Live CDs differently than HDD installs.

Yes. But I doubt LiveCDs will reach the 10s limit. (Though they may probably benefit from the work being done.) At the current state of the art the Ubuntu LiveCD takes a magnitude longer to boot than a HDD install.

Live thumbdrives, maybe :-)