Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot Boot Time

Ubuntu 11.10, dubbed Oneiric Ocelot, is reported to have an extremely fast boot time of 12 seconds. For reference, the industry standard for dubbing something “instant on.” They’ve done this by what looks like removing quite a bit of legacy coding from their desktop manager. As well as a faster boot time, this makes the whole desktop experience quicker and snappier. Oneiric Ocelot is in Alpha 2. A lot of people were complaining that their new Unity UI would add too much bulk, but the developers have fixed that problem as well. Alpha 2 brings us:

• After installing the OS onto a PC with an Intel (NSDQ:INTC) Core 2 Duo E8400 at 3.00 GHz and a hard disk drive, we stop-watched boot-up time at 12 seconds – more than three seconds faster than the previous best time we’ve measured. Since 10 seconds is considered the threshold for “instant-on” status, Ubuntu 11.10 is very close to a historic breakthrough;

• With LightDM under the hood, the Unity interface now provides true, two-click access to any application on the PC;

• The Ubuntu Software Center is undergoing just enough of a facelift to provide a major improvement. In very snappy fashion, you can now quickly navigate between software provided by Ubuntu, software provided by Canonical partners or software for purchase through, essentially, an Ubuntu app store. This was a little buggy in the alpha software (it kept shutting down on us unexpectedly) but once the kinks are worked out this could become a pretty big deal. The days of installing software onto Ubuntu desktops through line commands could soon be nothing but a distant memory.

Read more from where that was taken from here.