OMFG BOOTCHARTS OF VARIOUS DISTROS BY SEPHT ON THE SAME BOX, SAME HD, Releatively the same installs
Notes:
While some of you may say that your distro boots faster, It might, this computer isn't that fast, It has a very slow HDD, a decent CPU, and PC133 ram, the point is though, these are comparable results. So, if your Ubuntu boots in 40 seconds, Arch might do it in 15. FC4 in 32.
All systems were fully updated. Loaded into Graphical, and installed with Default/Basic settings. Same Computer, same HDD, all used ReiserFS 3.6.
The systems were installed on various paritions. ubuntu on /dev/hda1, arch and gentoo on /dev/hda3, and Slackware, FC3, FC4 were all on /dev/hda4, swap was the same at /dev/hda2.
For Arch, the wireless scripts from the wiki were added, and hotplug was swaped out of boot in favor of lshwd(check the wiki for more info); alsa, hal, dbus & kdm were also set to startup.
For Gentoo, setup from 2005.0, wireless, hal, dbus, and kdm+xorg were added(just like to arch). Gentoo's coldplug, added 4-5 seconds onto boot. Stage1 install, chost was i686, cflags were -O2 -march=pentium4 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer, which is what the wiki recommended as the max, safe, settings. Self-compiled latest gentoo kernel. Minimal USE tags, no extra crap.
For Ubuntu, a homemade script was added to configure the network at boot, added right before network, S41wlan.
For Slackware, 10.0, it was merged into current with swaret. 2.6 kernel paniced, 2.4 was used. Wireless not started during boot; Changed to run level 4 in order to boot graphical enviroment.
For Fedora Core 4, rhgb wasn't used (it's default, but no one else has an X11-based boot)(rhgb is there too). No SELinux, ReiserFS doesn't work with it.
For Fedora Core 3, rhgb was used (not rhgb is there too). No SELinux. No wireless or internet, not updated, stock.(Wireless wouldn't compile, lacks full kernel sources)
Arch - 23 sec
Gentoo - 38 sec
Coldplug results(42sec, w/ and w/o hotplug were give or take 1sec, this is the fastest of them), here.
Ubuntu Hoary - 55 sec
Slackware Current - 47 sec
Fedora Core 4 - 37 sec
You can find the rhgb results here, its 41 sec.
Fedora Core 3 - 74 sec
You can find the rhgb results here, its 53 sec.
You can obvious get better results on the Ubuntu, Slack, FC4 and FC3 boxs if you remove the sshd, cupsd, and other things you don't use, but because of Arch's "start with base and work from there" recommendation, you don't get those extra programs. Just something to take into account. Arch's HAL and Dbus I just added because they are generally useful and the others all use it, they could also be removed cutting off about 3 seconds.