No. I have not timed them both. I know that 8.04 takes considerably longer, but
then again it is older and I am running more servers/ daemons so it isn't
something that would be a fair comparison.

I don't shutdown or re-boot often, but when I do I am as impatient as the next
guy. It is never fast enough. Sometimes I re-boot several times in a day.
Usually to install another distro or to see if changes worked.

I am assuming that the kernel of 8.04 won't change much. Mine is stuck on
2.6.19. There was a kernel patch shortly after it came out due to some
vulnerabilities that were discovered. Unless there are more vulnerabilities it
won't change much and you should be able to leave your Ubuntu 8.04 box on until
April 2011. Which is great news for those who are happy with it and crave
stability. Me... I prefer adventure. I don't mind rebuilding my system from the
ground up, if need be. It has gotten to be old hat and it is second nature by
now.

I installed fresh copies of 8.10, even though I had 8.10 working well on another
partition. I wanted a fresh start instead of updating the rc1. It was probably
the same, but it took only a few minutes and I did not have much time invested
in that partition. Replacing my main distro is another story. It has just about
everything possible installed. Right now I have 4 versions of Ubuntu (8.04 32
and 64-bit plus the same for 8.10) installed which makes grub rather long. I
will pare it down to just two.

BTW, Fedora 10 is working on getting its boot time down. Reports are that it is
similar to what Ubuntu 8.10 has, but they hope to get it down to 20 seconds. I
have not used it yet, as I am not a Fedora enthusiast. I will give it a try
before its November 25 th release date, though. It is good to compare and see
what the competition is doing. If only they could share more so that we could
get the best of what Linux has to offer.