If you were using Ubuntu at the tail end of the late 2000s netbook boom, you may recall Canonical announced an “instant-on” version of Ubuntu.
Called Ubuntu Light, it was a pared-back version of regular Ubuntu that booted super fast – and seemed to disappear from memory just as quickly.
Booting a netbook in in 2010 was the sort of patience-sapping ordeal that made logging in to check your email feel as exciting as taking the bins out in the rain.
Aware of this, several manufacturers had begun bundling Linux-based “instant-on” systems that booted in seconds rather than minutes. These would let users get online quickly to check e-mails, browse the web and chat to friends.
As the premiere Linux distribution, Ubuntu wasn’t going to be left out.
What Was Ubuntu Light?
Announced in 2010, Ubuntu Light was a pared-back version of Ubuntu 10.10 designed to be pre-installed by OEMs (not end-users) on hardware, where it’d ship alongside Windows.
Ubuntu Light was not a full OS – you couldn’t install apps – but it booted in seconds for ‘instant’ web access
“The dual-boot opportunity gives us the chance to put a free software foot forward even in markets where people use Windows as a matter of course”, Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical’s founder, said at the time.
This cheap, but licensed, version of Ubuntu gave users a web-focused environment that was fast to boot, capable of getting to a working browser in under 10 seconds.
On boot up users could load up Windows (and go make a coffee while it ground through its start up process), or launch Ubuntu Light to get online in seconds.
Ubuntu Light had “typical startup times” of around 7 seconds on SSDs and closer to 20 seconds on a traditional hard drive, Canonical boasted at the time. It may sound slow by today’s standards, but it was ‘instant’ compared to Windows in that era.
Unity Light user experience
Out of the box, Ubuntu Light offered Chromium, Skype, and Intel’s Moblin Media Player. Wi-Fi worked out of the box, and standby resumed in seconds.
But as it was a ‘stateless’ install, there was no Ubuntu Software Center, Synaptic, etc; there was no easy way to install extra software without the sort of tinkering that most users using this wouldn’t know how to attempt.
Plus, Windows was there for that.
The assumption – increasingly valid even in 2010 – was that most of what people wanted to do quickly on a laptop had moved to the web, so Ubuntu Light focused on getting them to a web browser as fast as possible, without requiring them to commit to a life without Windows.
When done doing simple thing in Ubuntu Light, one would would click the Windows button at the bottom of the Unity launcher to reboot on into Windows.
Ubuntu Light was developed by Canonical for use by OEMs. It was not a special version that anyone could download and use – no downloadable ISO for regular devices and no ubuntu-light package to install via apt.
Ubuntu Light faded
The headline asks if you remember Ubuntu Light. I imagine a few of you do. Had I asked if you remember using it, the answer would’ve been different.
Because for all its promise, Ubuntu Light was preinstalled on just a handful of devices in a single 12 month period, and all of them came from a single OEM: Dell.
The best known of them was the Dell M101z which cost ~£499 at the time. Unlike netbooks, based around weak Intel Atom chips, it was more of a sub-notebook in specs:
- AMD Athlon II X2 Neo K345 (dual-core)
- 11.6-inch screen (1366×768)
- 4 GB RAM
- ATI HD Mobility Radeon HD4200 GPU
- ~3.5 hour battery (Ubuntu Light); 5 hours (Windows 7)
- Full-size keyboard
According to Dell’s support pages, two other laptops – the Dell Inspiron 10z and the Inspiron 11z 1120 – were sold with Ubuntu Light preinstalled alongside Windows 7 too.
What Happened to Ubuntu Light?
Ubuntu Light was not a roaring success. OEMs beyond Dell didn’t bite (the fact Canonical “licensed” the OS rather than offer it freely may have had something to do with that).
It was also late: instant-on systems were already available on laptops from other manufacturers. Asus, for example, often included Splashtop OS (sometimes marketed as ‘Express Gate’) which launched a small Linux environment instantly too.
By the time it was ready, faster processors, SSDs and Windows 7 had arrived to solve the problems Ubuntu Light set out to. Read to shine in a market that had moved on.
Plus, Microsoft did as Microsoft does: it made its then-new Windows 7 available to OEMs with incentives attached, chiefly: free on low-spec devices.
Ubuntu Light seems a curious footnote in the distro’s history, but though it was barely used it wasn’t useless.
The engineering work that went into trimming boot times benefitted Ubuntu desktop as a whole, and the project gave Ubuntu’s (then-new) Unity desktop some real world testing.
And the idea of a web-focused, instant-on OS had merit too. Google launched its first laptops with Chrome OS in 2011 – same web-first idea, but with the marketing and OEM buy in Canonical could only dream of.
‘The light that shines twice as bright shines half as long’, goes the famous quote from Blade Runner – well, the Ubuntu Light that barely shone at all, lasted even less…
Image credits: Mark Shuttleworth; LinuxUser