I've seriously got to look into running arch with a clear linux kernel. I knew they did some pretty serious optimization work, but this is definitely impressive.
Most of the bloat isn’t from the kernel. That’s the last thing you really optimize after getting rid of all the background services, startup tasks, etc.
I think you misunderstood. I was saying in a typical stack, time from POST to desktop is significantly overshadowed by userland bloat, not that Clear kernel is not worth the optimization.
Yeah, but a stock arch system is significantly less slowed than a typical stack. Getting to bootloader is still significantly longer than actual OS boot, though. I'm not usually a supporter of the "all software has to be open source" thing, but between spying issues and horrible code, it seems like coreboot is a serious benefit. Wish I could get it on my machine.