Canonical Once Again Aiming To Improve Ubuntu's Boot Speed

Nearly a decade ago Canonical/Ubuntu developers had a goal of a 10 second boot time. They made good on that for their netbook focus at the time, but in the years since their boot time has slowed down and we haven't seen any concerted effort on improving their boot speed again.

Depending upon your hardware and desktop environment, you may still have a fairly fast Ubuntu Linux boot experience but we've found Ubuntu to not always be the fastest and on some systems still far from their "10 second boot" goal they had back around 2009. Back in November I carried out an 11-way Linux boot speed comparison of different distributions and Ubuntu was far from the fastest.

Fortunately, ahead of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver", the Canonical desktop team is looking at improving the boot speed.

Will Cooke mentioned in his latest desktop status update, "We’ve started our investigation in to boot speed and are using systemd’s features to do some profiling. This will help us to identify and bottlenecks and get Bionic to boot as quickly as we can."

It will be interesting to see what they can accomplish for the April release of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS in making their boot speed competitive with other Linux distributions / operating systems.