Ask Lemmy

When it takes long yeah. Generally with a ssd boot times are pretty fast across the board but it also makes me expect a fast boot time. I expect a system to boot so fast now that there is little to no wait to the point powering up is not noticably slower than coming out of sleep. I get rather annoyed now if the os does not go by as fast as the bios screen. If a minute passes from pressing the button im like wtf. Again though I find most things can boot that fast now and its sorta unusual when they don't. One thing I have been loving about not being on windows is I don't seem to have to worry about various things getting put into start up automatically which would ruin my boot time on windows.

Its very important in embedded applications. Think of kiosks or other customer facing software. The longer it takes to boot the longer its out of service before the reboot finishes. It is essentially the upper bound of recovery time after an error.

When my desktop took a bunch of minutes to boot I put ff and compilers etc in the auto-launch-at-boot which made it take even longer but started the PC before I got breakfast. Everything up and ready when I got back.

Then I got an SSD.

Now I'm on linux so I rarely switch the PC off at all...

I remember the days before fast boot, you'd sit there like it was punishment, while it counted ram, then if you hit a snag, you're in for the big hurt

It shouldn't feel forever. I like that the longest part of booting my PC is the grub selection for my dual boot setup. I have an older laptop that takes about 2 minutes to boot. Not a deal breaker, but a noticeable delay.

I don't really care.

But it being snappy sure feels good. On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 feature making the setup unattractive, 5 being indifference, 10 being super important, booting fast is a 6.

I guess I do. I put the computer (a desktop) into suspend most nights so that it's pretty much up and running as soon as I turn it on the next day.

Even so, rebooting doesn't take that long. 30 seconds tops. Definitely not enough time to visit the bathroom or make a hot drink.

But the advantages to suspend are that it's quick and all my programs are as I left them. A reboot undoes most of that.

Yes, hibernating is also an option to keep open programs, but why do that when it can be quicker?

My only real concern with putting the machine into suspend is if there's a power cut and things end up in a weird state or I lose work because programs weren't closed properly, but then, that could happen at any point when I'm using it too.

Whatever time I'd get by tuning my start-up would be dwarfed by the BIOS and grub startup dance. I only really reboot when I need to test a kernel.

I don't care about how long it takes to boot up, but I do care how long it takes from login to the desktop environment being usable.

Dealing with servers, I'm used to long boot up times since the low-level lifecycle management takes forever. But, once it's booted, I expect it to be ready to go. I have no patience for "Just a moment...." or "Getting things ready" after I enter my credentials. All that shit should have been taken care of during the boot up.

Thankfully, I mostly use Linux at home/work, so that's less of an issue, but it does make it all the worse when I have to remote into a Windows server.

I care about not having slow boot time, but I don't really care if it's fast.

I don't really care, but I'm just a simple man.

The only times I cared about boot times was:

1. When BIOS/UEFI goes by too fast and I can't hit the boot menu key fast enough.
2. When I got my current computer back in 2022, I went from booting from HDD, to NVMe SSD over PCI-E 4.

Well, (potential) customers do care about quite a few completely useless metrics, or ta least meaningless ones. Exactly like they do with their photography gear. Marketing departments need those things to sell new device, right? ;)

It's a nice thing, but not a metric that I'm gonna brag about.