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 boots in 54.71 seconds!
PCLinuxOS 2009 boots in 56.01 seconds!
Fedora 10 boots in 69.27 seconds!
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
Additional Info (Key Virtual Machine Configuration):
VM Memory: 512 MB
VM Hard Disk: 8 GB
CPU: 1
Fedora 11 is trying to target a 20 second boot time.
As Mandriva 2009 Spring will have further boot improvements, I guess that Mandriva 2009 Spring should boot faster than Ubuntu.
The Mandriva 2009 Spring will be released shortly before the end of this month.
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2009.1_Tourhttp://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2009.1_Noteshttp://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2009.1_Reviewers_Guide
Seriously, we're never going to get an apples to apples review until we get synchronized release schedules.
I'll stick with PCLinuxOS. Boot time is not really a concern.
It isn't, actually. PCLOS last re-based from Mandriva 2007. All subsequent releases haven't been re-based against Mandriva, so you can't really say PCLOS 2009 is based on Mandriva 2009, they just happen to have the same version name.
PCLOS and MDV are fairly different in boot approach these days, I believe, I don't think the PCLOS result would imply much about MDV.
Author: Fedora 11 would be a much more interesting test than 10.
Running under Parallels will also mean that the results will be heavily influenced by how much of the OS drives data is cached by MacOSX.
In summary - a less than ideal (hopeless?) benchmark.
Ubuntu 8.10 ext4 vs ubuntu 9.10 ext3, I guess the winner will be ubuntu 8.10.
If your going to compare boot times of 3 different distro's, at least make sure they are all running the same desktop manager.
On my system, Fedora 11 (beta) boots at the same speed as Ubuntu 9.
I appreciate more the quality of the interface for the same desktop. Fedora Gnome to me seems to be better organized.
I have lockup issues with Ubuntu 9, and none so far with Fedora 11.
I don't boot 5 times a day, but once a day to pickup some patches, or to use the system. So Fedora 11 is booted on even days, and Ubuntu on odd days.
What is 5 seconds difference in a life-time.
Write about what works in one and not in the other, and what can be done to make both the Fedora and Ubuntu versions work flawlessly.