What a G1G1 user wants from an alternate OS

[Samuel Klein]

On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 11:04 AM, Ed McNierney <ed at laptop.org> wrote:
> Most "quick boot" systems are - at least in part - making a tradeoff by
> slowing things down later.  I would not want to "succeed" with a quick boot
> only to have people think the machine was slow because the next 5 things
> they did took a long time.

If it's just the next 5, that would be okay.  If it's all future app
launches, not.  Spreading out boot effort over the idle cpu time of
the first few minutes of each boot would be nice where possible.

> I think we need to be careful about being sucked into the "quick boot"
> ideal.  How often do you reboot your machines?  I just rebooted my MacBook
> Pro this morning for the first time in several weeks,

Sometimes I travel with my XO and a spare battery as my only laptop.
Rebooting happens at least once a day.  I'll try with F10
specifically, but it can happen when
 - running out of power (leaving it unintentionally in the wrong state in a bag)
 - getting stuck in a resume loop
 - locking up in one particular program (NM seems to be a regular
accessory to freezing)


> to me as a user.  If we provide good suspend/resume and power management
> support, users aren't going to reboot very often.

That hypothesis hasn't been borne out in Sugar.  If it is used for
long-term planning here, I hope it is with evidence this is viable.


> But striving for incremental improvements in boot time is, I
> think, much less
> valuable to user than an excellent suspend/resume
> experience (which my

IME, this isn't specific to boot time for the machine; also for boot
time for core apps (listed previously in the thread).

This is also a core failure of OO for me -- it is designed to give you
a good experience while running, but obviously not designed to have a
smooth bootup sequence or to be rebooted often. I reboot OO regularly,
and the required clickthrough/wait process for recovering interrupted
files, and the slow boot time, are abidingly frustrating.

SJ