I know a faster boot process is planned for next Ubuntu release (this idea goes further; so don't mark this as a duplicate for that).

The idea (advantages list is at the end of this idea):

Partner with computer builders, to provide this instant boot experience to the end user:

1) Sell computers with a dualboot of Ubuntu and Vista (it is important that they also should put Vista on it). It is *very* important that these computers should be marketed as premium computers (high price!).

2) User powers on his computer

3) Less than 1 sec later (maybe 0.5 sec or less!): show the Ubuntu login screen. This screen should look exactly the same as the current login screen we get when X is started. There only should be added some buttons at the bottom to boot from an inserted and bootable USB mass storage device, an inserted and bootable cdrom/dvd, or another OS installed next to Ubuntu.

4) This login screen will not disappear after some time interval (unless the user installed Ubuntu with auto-logon). Instead, it will wait until the user entered his username and password to proceed to the next screen.

5) This does not mean nothing should be loaded in the meantime. While the user is reading at the login screen, deciding whether he wants to boot another installed OS, boot a live CD, or boot Ubuntu, and while he is typing in his username and password, the system should already start loading Ubuntu.

6) It should start with loading a minimal environment with only a few applications (browser, email, and instant messaging), then it should proceed with loading the regular environment.

7) When the user finished entering his account information, he will be either showed to the minimal environment or the regular environment. If the user is very fast with entering his details, he still will have to wait a few secs to boot the minimal environment, but at least the *perception* will be that it is faster.

[....]

Given that Ubuntu and Debian packages are source compatible but not binary compatible, a simple mechanism for installing packages not available in the Ubuntu repositories suggests itself - download the source deb package from Debian repositories (and all its dependencies), compile it locally to a deb and install it.

Compilation does take time but the pros outweigh the cons - (a) the number of packages available in Ubuntu would increase greatly, (b) uninstalling a package would be easier than it would be with a configure/make/make install, (c) debian packages would be better suited to the system than the upstream versions, and (d) manually satisfying each dependency and doing the compile is tedious,

If an app crashes and the user clicks the close button, Ubuntu brings up a window saying that "This program is unresponsive [wait] [force quit]" or something like that. Sometimes Ubuntu doesn't catch a crash though, and so the user has to kill it either through system monitor or a terminal. Might be useful if the user could right click on the taskbar icon or close button and have options to force quit and maybe restart the app or something.

Not really urgent, but would minimize clicks to kill/restart unresponsive programs when Ubuntu doesn't catch a crash.

For a possible template to speed ubuntu up. The fluxbuntu wiki says that it removed some of the daemons that ubuntu uses by default to aid in minimizing usage of system resources.

I know fluxbuntu never really got off the ground, but as it was designed to leave a minimal memory footprint, there may be changes in it that can aid in the quest for the lightning quick jaunty.