OS Start up speeds

[jbaerbock]

In all of your opinions which OS has the fastest start up speed and speed once started? I found Ubuntu Dapper Drake rather fast personally. Now I switched to Linux Mint since it includes everything out of the box and works with everything for me and it is based on feisty but seems to start and shutdown slower. Anyone with Linux Distro experience or other OS experience know which OS tends to start/shutdown the quickest and which one runs smoothest while on? Is there one that has all of these?

[LaRoza]

I installed Zenwalk on a computer with 64 MB of RAM and it starts up faster than Vista with 2 gigs of RAM. With a more modern computer, I imagine Zenwalk flies.

-edit Zenwalk runs smooth also

[ThinkBuntu]

Arch is the fastest in my experience, with Debian a close second.

[jbaerbock]

What do you think is the most important aspect of a Linux distro, is start up speed important or are features more important? Like I said Mint start kinda slow but once on it runs smoothly, also shutsdown a little slow. Hibernate and Suspend just don't work but I don't really do that much anyway.

[ThinkBuntu]

What do you think is the most important aspect of a Linux distro, is start up speed important or are features more important? Like I said Mint start kinda slow but once on it runs smoothly, also shutsdown a little slow. Hibernate and Suspend just don't work but I don't really do that much anyway.
For me, in descending order of importance:

Stability
Ease of use
Security
Features
Laptop support
Speed when in the system
Application launch speed
Eye candy
Boot speed

[jbaerbock]

Ok I guess that list makes good sense. I plan to try the Zenwalk live CD today just out of curiosity since I here is it a great Distro but also just to see what the speed and boot process is like. I have only ever tried Red Hat and Ubuntu so I am trying to expand my Linux Distro horizons. Have any suggestions for other Distros that are a must try (preferably having a liveCD version)? I love Mint so wanna keep it but also would like to experience other distros, hence the LiveCD versions I look for. Thanks for your input!

[LaRoza]

I collect Live cds, so I have used a lot of them, in a short while:

I recommend:

Knoppix, one of the best, has a lot on it, can be installed on a flash drive
Slax, one of the best, easy to customize, can be installed on a flash drive
Zenwalk-live, very good, fast, good for computers with little RAM
DSL, small, fast,
Puppy, small fast

There are others, but these are useful as a OS.

These are all primarily intended to be Live only, but the distro's they are based off of may be the next step if you want something to install.

[.aku]

There already is some discussion on boot-up speeds, and general distro speed/responsivity here (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=272584)..

But still, my answer is Sidux (http://sidux.com).
Probably the fastest binary distro on the planet.

//aku

[jbaerbock]

I tried Zenwalk and while it was fast, it was lacking a lot of what I needed, none of my special keyboard buttons worked, it seems very bare-bones compared to Linux Mint.

[GrueTamer]

Gentoo is probably the fastest booting linux distro on the planet, when it's customized and configured correctly. But right behind it is arch.

[Cene]

Gentoo is probably the fastest booting linux distro on the planet, when it's customized and configured correctly. But right behind it is arch.

Agree.

On my axp 2800+, 512mb ram and 7600gs, it takes me 17 seconds to get from GRUB to working Openbox desktop! I bet you can't beat that very easily with similiar hardware.

[3rdalbum]

I don't know what the fastest booting distro is, but the fastest to shut down is the Gparted Live CD. Try it and you'll see; that's some serious deceleration!

[digitalbenji]

Feisty never takes me more than 30 seconds to boot, unless it runs an fsck, or readahead. Although, I guess 15 seconds would be pretty nice. I'd be interested to know if anyone knew any tricks to make Feisty boot faster.

[igknighted]

I don't know, its been over a month since I rebooted

yes, i am saying this is a pointless debate

[pxc]

Agree.

On my axp 2800+, 512mb ram and 7600gs, it takes me 17 seconds to get from GRUB to working Openbox desktop! I bet you can't beat that very easily with similiar hardware.


Erm. Who actually "shuts down" their LiveCDs? Unless I'm in the middle of editing my partition table or something crazy, I just flip the switch on the back of my power supply. Now that is a fast shutdown.

[LaRoza]

^It is easier to let the CD eject itself before shutting down.

[Cene]

Erm. Who actually "shuts down" their LiveCDs? Unless I'm in the middle of editing my partition table or something crazy, I just flip the switch on the back of my power supply. Now that is a fast shutdown.

Sorry? I talked about startup, not shutdown. And my Gentoo is installed to HDD, not a livecd. :)

[exploder]

In my opinion Feisty and Mint have very good start up speeds. Mint is my distro of choice . Both distros launch applications quickly as well. PCLinux also has a quick start up time.

[happy-and-lost]

I'm using Debian Sid on my good old laptop at the moment (1.73Ghz single core 1GB RAM). I found PCLOS (KDE), Arch (XFCE) and Ubuntu (GNOME) all take about 45 seconds to go from Grub -> Desktop (autologin), which struck me as odd. Sid, however, flies from Grub -> Desktop (fluxbox) in a mere 21 seconds. That's what I call SPEED!

[jbaerbock]

I have tried many distros and found the fastest startup to come from Sidux Distro but sadly all the fast ones don't have enough in the way of features. Mint is also my distro of choice since it includes all codecs + GUI version of ndiswrapper and does work rather fast. My only problem is that is doesn't seem to load very fast at startup. Some day I want to start it next to a Windows Box and see, problem is I don't own a windows box :D.

[johnny4north]

i m currently tuning and customizing my puppy linux 2.15 ce final[130mb]. it has alot of apps and i added my mplayer and firefox. there a few other small utilitties installed. puppy is very fast and this version even looks nice. boot in 39 seconds on a 1gig usb(2.0). i will try slax and leaner puppy on other usb. i believe fluxubuntu and zenwalk are the fast booters ive tryed. i will look at gentoo and pclinux. very interesting.

[ffi]

fastest boot time definitively: mandriva it boot in around 1/3 -1/2 of feisty's boot time

[deanlinkous]

debian of course

[Bachstelze]

My OpenBSD laptop boots in less than twenty seconds, from GRUB to the KDE desktop - lots of that time is taken by the KDE startup process, I guess it's about twelve for a command prompt.

[EdThaSlayer]

My Windows XP partition on my laptop starts up fast,but thats probably because I only use it for gaming(and I hardly install/uninstall things).

[kano]

41 seconds from GRUB to GDM. It could be faster, but I start mpd, samba, sshd, hplip, cups, lastfmsubmitd, lastmp, and distccd on boot cause I'm too lazy to start it when i need them :P I also think mounting 5 filesystems at boot slows it down a bit.

GDM to a fully functional openbox desktop takes about 3 seconds though.

running arch on a axp 2500+, 1.5gb ram

[Kodfish]

Agree.

On my axp 2800+, 512mb ram and 7600gs, it takes me 17 seconds to get from GRUB to working Openbox desktop! I bet you can't beat that very easily with similiar hardware.

My old (and i mean OLD, like 1996) Dell XPS takes 13 seconds to get to fluxbox. Whoo!

[Cene]

My old (and i mean OLD, like 1996) Dell XPS takes 13 seconds to get to fluxbox. Whoo!

:(

Gotta...find...something...to...speed...up... :D

[3rdalbum]

Maybe you could try LinuxBIOS? The graphical mode in that can get you booted up to a simple window manager in about 9 seconds.