This is weird. My laptop which is newer and faster by over twice as much than my desktop, and 64-bit nonetheless VS 32-bit, seems to boot slow compared to the latter. What is even more weird is that the laptop appears to load the DE slower because it attempts to ready everything in one go. As a result, after logging in, it is stuck for how many seconds with just the GDM background (the default Ubuntu wallpaper) before it loads the desktop. Imagine a KDE splash screen after login without the splash! Not very pretty.
I know having a lot of indicators can be one main cause, but I almost have the same indicators on my laptop and desktop, the latter just ahead by one more indicator. I'm not saying desktop is faster on this (loading the DE) but the impression is faster because the difference is that after logging in on the desktop it will very shortly load Unity interface then load the indicators one by one. The progress can be seen on the top right portion as the indicators appear.
This is how I want it ideally. Is there a way to recreate this? Some settings under compiz, GDM/Gnome or Unity, or whatever I have to tweak to get this behaviour?
Thank you! :)
*note: As indicated above, I am on Natty with Unity