Ubuntu 11.10 vs. Fedora 16: Boot Speed, Power Consumption

In this article is the first of several articles comparing the recently released Fedora 16 to Ubuntu 11.10. This first article is looking at the boot performance and power consumption from several different notebooks when performing clean installs of Fedora Verne and Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot.

There are several significant differences between Ubuntu 11.10 and Fedora 16 that make for an interesting comparison. Fedora 16 is shipping with the Linux 3.1 kernel and the GNOME 3.2.1 desktop, including the GNOME Shell. Fedora 16 also furthers its integration with the much talked about systemd init service, after it made its premiere with Fedora 15. Fedora also ships with the bleeding-edge Linux graphics stack. Meanwhile, Ubuntu 11.10 shipped last month with the Linux 3.0 kernel and some GNOME 3.0 packages around Canonical's Unity desktop. Ubuntu has no plans in the foreseeable future to abandon Upstart in favor of systemd. Both Fedora 16 and Ubuntu 11.10 have some similarities like both using GCC 4.6 and sticking to the EXT4 file-system by default for now.

The battery testing and power consumption comparison is being done from a Lenovo ThinkPad T61, ASUS Eee PC, and Lenovo ThinkPad W510 to represent a few popular notebook/netbook configurations on the market.

Linux desktop performance benchmarks and other articles are forthcoming.

The boot speed was measured using Bootchart and for each clean install of the 64-bit version of Ubuntu 11.10 and Fedora 16, the Phoronix user was set to automatic log-in. All other distribution settings were at their defaults. Each system rebooted three times before capturing the Bootchart result.