For years, despite that computers’ speed increased in leaps and bounds, their start-up times slowly degraded; from near instant-on of early 8-bit systems to long minutes of crapware-laden, cheap XP laptops. Fortunately, this trend has been reversed lately; Ubuntu Lucid, while not offering anything to write home about by itself, boots consistently fast in about 10-30 seconds on most of the hardware I had the pleasure to test it on.
Today, while testing new display drivers, I found out that new X.org coupled with a newer kernel, both prepackaged courtesy of xorg-edgers staff, cut the system start-up time considerably, by 3 to 5 times, from quick but not great 10-15 sec down to very consistent 3 seconds of grub-to-gdm time.
Of course, it must be noted that this particular system is backed by an SSD, which adds helps shave a lot of loading time that normally is spent on spinning platters. On the other hand, this is exactly the same hardware the previous combination ran, so there is no difference in hardware capabilities here.