The freshly released Ubuntu 9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope" is said to have significantly improved its boot speed. So I got curious and decided to compare its boot performance to Fedora 10 and PCLinuxOS 2009.

I did the test by installing the three distributions through Parallels Desktop virtual machine utilizing the same configuration on my Mac (Macbook Pro 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo). Note that I decided to use Xubuntu to give some variation on desktop environment as we already have GNOME in F10 and KDE in PCLOS 2009.

To measure the boot speed, I started the timer immediately after GRUB, and then stopped it until the desktop has loaded completely.

Now if you are ready for our boot speed war, see the clips below:

Xubuntu 9.04 won, but only by a slim margin against PCLOS 2009. I was surprised to see Fedora 10 as being the slowest to boot among the three.

Additional Info (Key Virtual Machine Configuration):
VM Memory: 512 MB
VM Hard Disk: 8 GB
CPU: 1