“I would show you this on my laptop”, said a visitor to our company recently, “but it would take forever to boot up”.
And I realised how long I’d been living in a Mac world: for the last eight or nine years I’ve had a laptop where you open the lid and start typing pretty much immediately. (Camvine is an all-Mac shop except for the servers, which are Linux, and stay on all the time anyway.)
The slow start-up (and even rather painful resume-from-suspend) that people in the Windows world often experience has led to some modern machines having a minimal Linux installed alongside Windows, so you don’t have to wait for your entire world to load if you just want to check something quick on the web. Chris Nuttall, writing in the FT techblog, seems to be quite impressed with Presto.