On Wed, 2008-10-29 at 09:16 +0000, Richard Hughes wrote:
> I was thinking about trying to tackle the boot time of fedora (and get
> to the 5 second nirvana), but I fear that bikeshedding like this will
> mean we are still loading sendmail, isdn, nfslock, and all other
> legacy stuff in ten years time.
Just listening to all this discussions make my hairs stand on ends.
Whatever change is proposed, there are 10 people jumping on it why
it shouldn't be done!
This is most frustrating. Again and again, we keep putting the needs
of the fringe users ahead of what is needed by regular users. Like
most others OSS projects, there seems to be a total lack of weighing
when it comes down to these things.
What is important? Well, it's not rocket science (and don't ask for
studies, I don't care for that kind of discussion):
1. Feedback
Users need to know that the computer listens to them and it
does something as a result. Many thumbs up to NetworkManager
and PackageKit for providing much needed feedback.
Thumbs down to System | Shut down ... that many times doesn't
do anything. How hard is it shut down a system?!?
2. Latency
It goes hand-in-hand with (1). People have 0 tolerance to wait
for anything, we can not be too fast. To the point where they
sometimes prefer fast-and-buggy than slow-and-correct (within
limits of course). Here we suck big time: horrible boot times,
slow shutdown, slow app startup (1-2s to start a stupid TextEditor
in Gnome on a modern machine!).
3. Relevance
Get important stuff working. What's important today?
Well, it's Web, Email, Music, Video. The rest is bonus.
Here things are getting a bit better: FF3 is fast, Evo is getting
better. However, on F9 I still can't listen to music properly,
as it skips continuously on my 2-CPU 4GB box even with no load.
And this only if I start pulseaudio with --no-cpu-limit, otherwise
I get no music 'cause pulseaudio kills itself the moment I start
doing pretty much anything on the box! With no auto-restart.
Don't even get me started on Skype.
What we shouldn't concern ourselves with:
* what vt X starts on. startup time trumps it
* any sort of mail delivery agent, unless it's <10ms to start.
* people that have / on NFS. Those can do a bit more work.
* any other feature that slows down the startup from a local HD
for a regular desktop user that just wants to surf the web.
My $0.02.
--
Dimi Paun <dimi@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Lattica, Inc.
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