My adventures into the lightweight Ubuntu Core operating system was motivated by a 14-year old laptop with Intel CPU. By multiple measures on the specification sheet, it is roughly equivalent to a modern Raspberry Pi. (~1 GHz processor, ~1GB RAM, ~30GB storage, etc.) As a test drive, I had tried setting it up as a web kiosk and failed due to incomplete graphics driver support. (Though I did get it working on a modern laptop.)

Which leads to the next question: how well does Ubuntu Core perform on a Raspberry Pi performing the exact same web kiosk task? And how does that compare to doing the same thing on Raspbian OS? They’re both variants of Linux trimmed down for less powerful hardware. Raspbian is packed with features to help computing beginners get started, and Ubuntu Core has almost no features at all to offer a clean baseline.

My workbench is not a comparison test lab so I didn’t have many copies of identical hardware for a rigorous comparison. Two monitors were close but not quite identical in resolution. (1920×1080 for the LG, 1920×1200 for the Dell.) The two Raspberry Pi should be identical, as should the microSD cards, but they’re not powered by identical power supplies. To establish a baseline, I set them both up for Raspberry Pi web kiosk using my top search hit for “Raspberry Pi Web Kiosk”. Then launched them side-by-side a few times to see how close their performance were from power-up to rendering a web page. (For this test, the Hackaday.com site.) This took approximately 40-45 seconds, sometimes one is faster and sometimes the other is faster. For some runs, the two systems were within one second of each other, sometimes they were almost 5 seconds apart. Establishing the fact this comparison method has a measuring error of several seconds.

With an error margin established, I removed one of their microSD cards and installed Ubuntu Core for Raspberry Pi 3 on it. Once initial configuration were complete, I installed snaps for the web kiosk tutorial I followed earlier for the Dell laptops. I was very curious how fast a stripped-down version of Ubuntu would perform here.

The answer: not very, at least not in the boot-up process. From power-up to displaying the web page, Ubuntu Core web kiosk took almost 80 seconds. Double the time necessary for Raspbian, and that was even with a full install of Raspbian Buster with zero optimizations. There are many tutorials online for building a Raspbian-based web kiosk with stripped-down list of components, or even starting with the slimmer Raspbian Buster Lite operating system which would only get faster.

There may be many good reasons to use Ubuntu Core on a Raspberry Pi (smaller attack surface, designed with security in mind, etc.) but this little comparison indicates boot-up speed is not one of them.