Ubuntu aims for ten-second boot time with 10.04 (ars Technica)

By clean I meant "fresh install".

> You missed the main point I was trying to make.

No, I chose to take a shot at your wording. After that sentence I spoke to the rest of your concerns.

> I think in particular the Desktop as download directory xdg setting that
> Ubuntu carries will make it difficult for that 4 second "idle" desktop
> budget into the Gnome desktop to be achievable outside of the very
> special conditions of a fresh desktop that has seen little or no
> internet usage.

As I said, the budgets are for a fresh install on the target platform. The aim is not to ensure that every Ubuntu desktop on every system loads in 4 seconds, as great as that would be.

> Does having a list of "Recent Documents" significantly degrade the speed
> of the GNOME panel loading? If Ubuntu is still pointing xdg download
> directory to the desktop, does having things like thumbnail images to
> render of downloaded files severely degrade bootup?

If they do then we should look at fixing them.

Trying to provide a good base on which we can build doesn't mean that we won't try and fix other issues. We don't have to fix all performance issues in order to get some benefit.

The 10s target is a known state, a fresh install, on a single platform for consistency, so that it is easily repeatable. Once that is done it might be nice to have secondary targets that provide more "real world" setups. It's easy for anyone to profile their particular sequence and help to trim the fat though, so you don't need the same control over the platform and image, and time targets aren't useful, they are essentially arbitrary anyway.

Thanks,

James