Today over beers with some of the Novell hackers I wrote a new session manager for GNOME. It goes like this:
#!/bin/sh eval `ssh-agent` gnome-settings-daemon & gnome-panel & nautilus -n & beagled --bg & gnome-screensaver & exec metacity
Login time on my machine, as measured with a stopwatch, has been reduced from 10 seconds to 3 seconds (warm buffer cache in both cases), and my computer now has more free memory.
The panel draws itself in one second, and two of those seconds are just waiting for Nautilus to draw the desktop. With preloading during boot and a fix for the slow Nautilus desktop rendering, I think it’s probably possible to have a 1-2 second login on most hardware.
