There is focus on Karmic to boot fast, 10 seconds or so. My question is, does anyone out there actually care about boot times?
My big LCD Vizio TV takes 10 seconds or so to turn on. I don’t complain. My Directv receiver box takes over a minute to configure it’s satellite access. My stove takes 5 minutes to preheat.
The point being, nobody sits there and just watches their computers boot. I don’t watch my dell mini 9 boot exclusively, I turn it on, and focus on something else like TV or whatever else I am doing at the time.
More to the point, who is rebooting and why? I think at this point in computers, people suspend, not shutdown. That’s what all of the Mac people do atleast.
I just hate to see people focusing on issues which don’t solve any fundamental problems that critics point out about Linux in general, and instead focus on the mundane.
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#1 by aanderse on June 9, 2009 - 11:16 am
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This has been discussed dozens of times in the past. The home pc user says “who cares” and the student who uses their laptop in class says “I do!”.
Personally I don’t care too much about actual boot times up to my Display Manager, but once I get to the Display Manager and type my password in I want things to happen *fast* (as I’m ready to use the computer at that point).
In conclusion…. While it might not draw new users in, there are existing gnu/linux users who would benefit from fast boot times so a worth while goal to strive for (probably).
#2 by Hans on June 9, 2009 - 11:18 am
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Yeah, waiting for laptops to boot in class is a total pain.
#3 by Alex Launi on June 9, 2009 - 11:21 am
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If you actually read Scott’s UDS presentation, he answers this question pretty well. Boot time/suspend resume are not mutually exclusive goals. They’re both important for different reasons.
Slides are linked in his ubuntu-devel post https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2009-June/028308.html
#4 by Wouter on June 9, 2009 - 11:39 am
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Actually my tv takes about 2-3 seconds before showing an image and I always found that delay really annoying (and the delay when switching channels is even worse). For pc’s I think in the end the goal should be instantaneous boot just like any other electric device.
#5 by Jackflap on June 9, 2009 - 11:46 am
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oh yeah.. imagine a 10 second resume from hibernate.. now that WOULD be cool!
i can kinda see the uses of the 10s boot, my parents for instance love it.. but I personally would love to see more work on speeding up suspend/hibernate (or even unifying it the way macs do).
#6 by Yuriy Voziy on June 9, 2009 - 11:47 am
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When you need to find something fast you don’t want to wait.
#7 by sharms on June 9, 2009 - 11:56 am
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If 10s is important to students, why does Apple do so well with that market segment?
Mac OS X doesn’t boot in 10 secs, but that doesn’t stop or hinder it’s growth.
#8 by Wolfger on June 9, 2009 - 11:57 am
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I bitch daily about the boot time on my work laptop (WinXP). Of course, sometimes I don’t shut it down at night, to avoid the Eternal Boot the next morning, but I’d say that > 50% of the time that I do that, the laptop crashes on me the following day.
Now maybe Linux doesn’t ever need to be rebooted (in my experience, it really doesn’t), but then again, it also can’t run the apps my job requires, so that’s an entirely moot point.
I guess the point is: yes, some people care about boot time. You obviously don’t. So maybe you should focus your personal efforts elsewhere? Or is there some mandate that all contributors must focus on this?
#9 by Rick Harding on June 9, 2009 - 12:02 pm
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Just another “I care”. I hate how long it takes my tivo and such to start up. I can’t stand oven preheat times, and I definitely am looking to get an SSD this summer with one of the goals to be a major boot time improvement.
#10 by sharms on June 9, 2009 - 12:17 pm
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@Wolfger – The goal is to get Ubuntu Linux in the hands of as many people as possible. My point being that boot time is not a blocker to adoption.
#11 by Qhartman on June 9, 2009 - 12:27 pm
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I care. The more time I have to wait for any device to “get ready”, the less time I have to do what I am trying to accomplish.
@sharms – As someone who spends a ton of time around Mac users, I’d say it’s because they rarely actually shut their machines off, and therefore rarely have to wait through a bootup. Hibernate/suspend is reliable and the battery life is good enough that they can take the small power hit. Most of the people I work with lug their Mac laptops with them everywhere they go, and only “reboot” once every couple of weeks.
#12 by Peter on June 9, 2009 - 12:27 pm
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Boot speed is a huge feature, for new user initial impression and long term usage. Most people I know that try OSX the first time are dazzled by its boot speed and initial responsiveness.
Being a laptop user myself, I am desparate for a 10s boot. If my spinning drive can’t make it after Karmic, I’ll finally be ready to find an SSD that can.
“Does anyone actually care?” — YES, and strongly!
#13 by jonatan on June 9, 2009 - 12:28 pm
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yes, suspend never works
#14 by Andy on June 9, 2009 - 12:29 pm
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Perhaps boot-time is not a “blocker” for Ubuntu adoption, but lightning fast boot times would be a terrific selling point, for certain users. I rarely reboot my desktop at home. I just stick it into Hibernate. In contrast, I vary my behavior with my work laptop. Sometimes I shut it down. Sometimes I hibernate it. I want both to be faster. When I’m running on battery power, it annoys me to no end how much power I waste waiting for my computer to come up to a usable place (besides, I’m wasting time.).
#15 by alex on June 9, 2009 - 12:31 pm
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perhaps the reason why no one complains is BECAUSE ubuntu has a faster boot time. i guarantee if GNU/Linux took 5 minutes to boot people would complain about it just as much as they complain about ‘no games’ or ‘xyz program doesnt run’.
Just accept that there are those of us who enjoy fast boot times. please don’t say our resources or efforts in this primary volunteer project are a waste of time because you leave your machine on 24/7 and it doesn’t effect you. Its a pretty near-sighted approach in my opinion. Instead, accept that there are those of us that ‘do care’, and ubuntu in general is better for it.
#16 by ghindo on June 9, 2009 - 12:39 pm
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I agree with the other people commenting here; I’m a student who uses his laptop in class, and a fast boot time is a really nice feature to have. And I know my demographic isn’t the only one which appreciates fast boot. One of the biggest complaints I hear from computer users is that their computers take far too long to boot. I disagree that a faster boot time won’t attract new users.
#17 by Cap'n Refsmmat on June 9, 2009 - 12:40 pm
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Try booting — not from suspend, but from a complete shutdown — a MacBook. It is astonishingly fast. You may be used to your regular boot times with Ubuntu (I mean, I was, since it was so much faster than my XP install) but when you try OS X you get spoiled.
In terms of practicality, no, I don’t have situations where I absolutely need it to be on in five seconds. But you wouldn’t want to wait a minute for Firefox to load, so why should you have to wait a minute to get the computer on to use Firefox?
#18 by bigM on June 9, 2009 - 12:43 pm
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Amen. I’d rather see Firefox start time shaved to <1 s.
#19 by sharms on June 9, 2009 - 1:02 pm
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@Cap’n Refsmmat – I compared the same exact machine, with Dell Netbook 8.04 and OS X Leopard on the Dell Mini 9, and no, OS X does not boot faster.
I think I have not articulated the right idea: There are so many blockers for adoption, and I don’t see bootup time being one.
#20 by Dave on June 9, 2009 - 1:18 pm
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I work at a helpdesk. Our users care deeply about boot times. It directly ties into whether a user perceives the pc as a good or bad. You won’t hear anything if the boot time is “reasonably” quick. However, if they perceive it as slow then you will never convince them that the software (or hardware) is any good.
#21 by Chris Peplin on June 9, 2009 - 1:34 pm
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The reason I care about boot time is because suspend has never worked reliably on my laptop, so I am forced to do a complete shutdown/reboot every time I bring it out.
If suspend worked as reliably as I see it working on a Macbook, I wouldn’t care about cold-start boot time.
#22 by sharms on June 9, 2009 - 1:36 pm
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@Chris – There we go, and that is what I am talking about. Spending more time on reliable suspend / resume is a much better focus.
#23 by Livio on June 9, 2009 - 2:09 pm
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Actually, I care about startup times.
Every morning before computer is ready to use, I can go to toilet and kitchen.
Then I come back and eat my breakfast waiting before Fx and Tb start.
Even Mono-based Banshee starts faster than XUL-based apps.
#24 by sharms on June 9, 2009 - 2:11 pm
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I agree, application startup times are absolutely critical. Once the user is engaged, task switching / launching apps etc matters immensely.
#25 by Florob on June 9, 2009 - 2:26 pm
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I care too, for more then one reason:
1. Desktop. I turn it off when I’m not using it for a longer period of time because a) it’s loud and b) it just eats power when I’m not using it.
When I notice I have to look something up urgently, or generally want to get working it is a very annoying wait until it is booted.
2. Laptop. I turn it off because when it’s turned off it generally is for a relatively long time and I don’t trust suspend to not drain my battery. Suspend to disk (hibernate) is not an option because I use harddisk encryption, which makes hibernate way slower then booting.
I’m one of those “I do” students. I’m generally not using it in class as some suggest, but between classes, which means I have (often) ~15min to boot and do what I wanted to do. The faster the startup the more time I have to e.g. look up what’s for lunch in the canteen.
Admittedly I’m not really convinced that this will aid adoption, but I think it is really useful and therefore a worthwhile goal.
#26 by Harley on June 9, 2009 - 2:38 pm
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I’m not even going to rant about Macs working well because Apple only supports limited hardware. Rather, I should point out that working on suspend/resume requires a much deeper understanding to work on than working on making it boot faster. Often it could even require some hacking on the kernel to get suspend/resume working properly on some of the hardware that does things a bit funky. That said, I don’t think that getting some organization around improving suspend/resume shouldn’t be done. But it would require things like getting the community involved and have a way for them to test suspend/resume and submit detailed reports for when it doesn’t work. I could easily see that project taking 12 months to do (6 months to get some reporting software written to test suspend/resume and get that out to people to get reports, then another 6 to work through all the reports, fix the bugs, test and repeat.)
Ok, I’ll quit typing at this point.
#27 by Ari Torhamo on June 9, 2009 - 2:57 pm
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I’m a home user and I like fast booting very much. It’s not rare that I have only a moment to do something in the Internet, so I don’t want to waste any more time than necessary staring at the boot process. I may come home and stay only for a short while, so speedy boot is very nice.
#28 by ItMatters on June 9, 2009 - 3:45 pm
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Pretty much everywhere I go, people seem to hate waiting for devices, including all of the ones you mentioned, not just computer boot time.
My dad bought a DLP TV that takes about 10 seconds to turn on, and also can’t be turned on for 30 seconds after it is turned off. That annoyed him so much that he returned it a week later. I tried to switch my brother to Ubuntu a few years back… he was very insistent that Ubuntu was slower then Windows because of the boot speed, so why use a slower OS (this was a few years back)? I know the slow boot speed drives me crazy when I’m running late for class (and I don’t have the option to suspend because if I have it suspended the night before, the battery won’t last through all of my classes, if I boot it up during my first class, I can use it throughout the day without plugging in).
Hell, my parents house also has a really slow toaster (takes like 5 minutes to cook a slice of bread, mine requires less then 1 minute to cook it to the same level), and that drives me crazy every single time I’m there. At work every single day, people complain about RHEL5′s boot time (which is extremely slow). When someone installed the latest Ubuntu on their laptop (with ext4) and showed it to the other guys at work, one of the Windows users actually switched to Ubuntu because of it.
It seems to matter to an awful lot of people around me. Yes, its not everyone… those who leave their computer on all the time (and waste all of that electricity) and those who only suspend (who tend to plug in their laptops a lot more often, and in more places) probably won’t appreciate it very much, but the rest of us will.
#29 by Daniel Wiberg on June 9, 2009 - 4:03 pm
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Yes, boot times are important, even if you use suspend/resume, the computer is always shut down when you need it in a hurry.
But startup time after login window is a lot more important then before and should be payed more attention to.
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#30 by Scott Ritchie on June 9, 2009 - 5:30 pm
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There is little difference between 2 and 4 minute boot times, but there’s a world of difference between 1, 3, 10, and 30 seconds. Once you get low enough, it changes the way you use the computer.
#31 by BDP on June 9, 2009 - 6:02 pm
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A faster boot time would be nice because I have to reboot my computer with Ubuntu fairly often. Something happens which causes the display to get scrambled and the only way I know to fix it is to turn off the computer. This usually happens when I’m trying to do some work so its really annoying.
#32 by Rusty on June 9, 2009 - 7:00 pm
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Speed for boot time is important for several reasons. On a stable desktop, it may not be all that important. It isn’t for my primary desktop at home, or my server desktop at work. Both are on almost continuously, only reloading when there has been a kernel update or some software package that can’t just be reloaded on it’s own (ssl updates seem to fall into this catagory.) For those systems, it doesn’t really bother me if it takes 5 min to come up.
On the other hand portable systems need to be able to be started fast, and being able to demonstrate that condition is very important. If you are evangelizing linux to someone at a coffee shop, and you decide that showing the individual something is going to be the way to make them aware of what you mean, odds are you are going to have to turn on your computer. (I don’t leave my laptop on all the time, and I certainly don’t leave it on when going from one place to another. I don’t quite live within my computer, so just because I am sitting down at a table at a coffee shop, or something, does not mean that I’m going to have the computer turned on and waiting for me to show off this tidbit or that. I’ll have to turn the computer on.
There’s a lot of great things about suspending to ram, suspending to HD, hibernating, etcetera. However I don’t always want to have everything that’s on my desktop when I shut down to be there when I go to show off the computer. In fact if I have a couple or three browser windows open on different desktops, an image editing application up, and some video footage that I’ve been working on, all come up out of hibernation, It does not necessarily mean that I will have impressed the potential user.
In any case the one thing you do not want to do is start by showing a system that takes as long as their home or work computer to boot up. You want to start off by impressing them with the fact that you can do something as soon as possible after hitting the power button. Not some 3 minutes later.
So while I don’t have a tremendous need to have a fast boot on my home desktop and work server, I do want a fast boot or my laptop at home.
Likewise if my server at home is going to take 30 min to boot, I’m not going to be very happy about systems that loose their address while they wait for the dhcp server to restart, I’m going to be upsetting friends who rely upon my web server. So that’s another place where I do not want to wait a long time for disk scanning to complete. Even with journalling, you will occasionally need to do a full fsck on the drive. That takes a significant amount of time on a 1 or 1.5 T drive.
But hey, if it isn’t important to you, then OK. it’s not important to you. I might not agree, but I don’t recall anyone suggesting that we had to have a consensus on all issues.
#33 by David on June 9, 2009 - 9:24 pm
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@Alex: Thanks for the link to the presentation. It covers a good number of reasons to have faster boot times.
#34 by Miles on June 10, 2009 - 1:07 am
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Yes, a 65 seconds long Crunchbang boot on a Eee 701 is really an obstacle to using it regularly for me.
#35 by CAS on June 10, 2009 - 1:57 am
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Just to add my 2 cents.
1. On the desktop….no. (Its never off except for kernel updates or nvidia driver updates)…and its a screamer so boot times are sub 30 seconds anyway.
2. Laptop, yes it matters because its convenient to be up and running quickly from a standing stop and just cuz.
#36 by spaetz on June 10, 2009 - 3:12 am
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I DO, thank you very much.
I see your question pop up regularly, and just as regularly about 50% of all people shout that they need it. Why can’t you just accept that some peoples use pattern is different from yours? You might be happy to make coffee while your stove warms up, but when I enter the office, I want to start working, especially after having sat down to type in my user/passwd.
#37 by François on June 10, 2009 - 4:48 am
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Not only for student, but for professionnal use too: our sales rep don’t take their laptop on the field that much, because XP gets slower and slower to boot with time. It’s clearly NOT convenient to wait 3 minutes for your laptop to boot if you want to show something to a customer. Now they have some Dell Mini 9 netbooks with Ubuntu, and thanks to the small size and very reliable boot time, they use them on the field. The faster the better.
#38 by Bert Van de Poel on June 10, 2009 - 7:43 am
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I do care as well, because I have loads of servers running on this PC booting is slow. Any way to make it boot faster would be great.
Also, I hate it when I have to wait if I need my laptop right away.
(Yes I know I should stop autostarting servers and buy a descent laptop but that’s not the point)
#39 by Wurst on June 10, 2009 - 9:56 pm
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I don’t care. Yadda yadda.
Suspend and resume is finally fixed with 2.6.30 (according to Linus and he should probably know best).
So why not have both?
All these posts are pointless. It is not like all boot optimizers will magically fix some other shortcoming if they do not spend time on boot time.
You my friend lack basic understanding how FOSS works.