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Comment by convery | Hacker News Reader

Recently I went through the attic and found an old laptop (120Mhz CPU, 32Mb RAM, low-RPM 810Mb HDD) with Win98 installed on in. To my amazement it could boot and start Excel and Word within 10sec. Compared to my workstation (20 cores + HT @ 2.5Ghz, 110Gb RAM, PCIe SSD) which takes upward of 40 sec to get to the desktop.

Really makes one question the current state of software. Sure, Win7 has some more features, but imagine someone in 98 saying: "we have a great idea for a new OS, it'll have more features than Win98 and it'll only take 4 times longer to boot if you are running it on a cluster of supercomputers, but those new features are gonna be worth it" =P

Sidenote on the hardware side: The laptop had a hinge for the keyboard so you could raise it to a 20 degree angle, the CD/Floppy drive had the same connector as the battery so you could swap the drive for another battery if going on a trip. There were two sliding switches for backlight and speaker-volume. Access to the internals via a simple latch. It may have been a brick but it had interesting ideas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_ThinkPad_760

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There is NO WAY an HDD laptop boots Windows 98 in 10 seconds. Even booting Windows 98 in a VM on a 1yr old processor backed by _friggin RAM_ takes slightly more than that.

Windows 98 used to take 1-3 minutes to boot on that level of hardware. And if you had any type of network, it was probably even more than 3 minutes. There is a reason hibernation (even at the BIOS level) was all the rage these days.

For better or worse, MS did something on Windows during the XP era that finally made it be able to boot fast (on modern hardware at least). Win2K still has insanely long "delays".

Maybe has something to do with cached driver configuration, but I don't know which version of Windows introduced it. It has to do with remembering which drivers were loaded the last time the OS ran and loading those first on reboot. Saves time on checking the whole driver catalog.

I remember at the time some propaganda about XP doing "concurrent initialization" for some drivers. My impression is they just fine-tuned some of the IO delay loops (or equivalent). Most of the Win2k boottime is spent with no CPU or disk usage. XP is way more efficient at that.

When I was a kid I remember thinking that if it took 20 seconds to boot now, how fast would it be in 20 years when hardware got significantly better.

Fast forward to now and I'll hit the power button, go do some stuff for a few minutes, and then finally use the damn thing.

Otoh, linux used to take forever to boot compared to windows, now its speedier than windows.

It really depends what is running. By default on Ubuntu at least it has a service that is blocking waiting for a network connection.

Hmm, i dont run ubuntu, but what happens if the wifi is down? That seems exceptionally silly.

It used to be you could hit ctrl-c to stop waiting for dhcp. But last time I ran into that on Debian, you just had to wait for it to give up; of course that was also waiting for dhcp on a wired NIC that wasn't even plugged in.

That was quite a few years ago, I'd hope it got better, but it was one of the things that made me decide to move to FreeBSD.

In 2001 I could go from LILO to idling WindowMaker in 12 seconds, far faster than Win2k or XP or any of the earlier DOS-based Windowses

Not on my machine. Windows 10 takes just a few seconds (fast boot disabled because of dual boot), whereas Linux Mint takes around 20 seconds. Maybe it's because I have many USB devices attached.

It doesn't matter but shutdown matters a lot on dual boot systems, and unfortunately Linux Mint sometimes takes minutes to restart. I believe it's related to systemd and it's very annoying (sometimes I need to switch quickly because I take Zoom calls on Windows).

What machine? I've got a 16GB i7 SurfacePro, seems to take minutes compared to other computers I use.

Windows updates still take hours and still sometimes need multiple reboots vs Kubuntu which updates whilst in use and barely ever needs rebooting.

Having come back to MS Win (for work) after a decade+ away, and with an MS produced computer I was expecting to be blown away by the speed.

Aside: have you tried systemd-analyze blamw, very useful for diagnosing boot slowdowns; https://www.commandlinux.com/man-page/man1/systemd-analyze.1...

It's a 1800x Amd system with 32GB Ram, main partition on SSD, /home on harddisk. Windows updates take minutes, Linux updates are usually even faster (except for upgrades which are much slower than Windows upgrades).

I'll try that analyzer. But I don't think the boot is slowed down, it's just a bit slower than Windows. Shutdown takes minutes, though.

I agree. Even when Windows has "fast startup" enabled, the time from POST to actual desktop in Linux is still better and has improved significantly, and Windows still has that "tends to go slower as you start to install stuff on it". These days I can usually reach Gnome even before my _monitors_ have had time to boot.

I used to like how KDE could load a session in the background so when you logged in it was ready: for me the post-login takes as long as boot; which makes it annoying.

Not as bad as it used to be when the audio tape failed after 20 mins, but still.

What kind of janky jalopies are you folks running? It takes my machine all of ten seconds to boot, wait for me to enter my pin, and load the desktop fully.

Yeah... I mean, I bag on Windows as much as the next Linux zealot, but my Win10 gaming machine -- still an Athlon64 -- boots from cold start to usable desktop in 5 seconds. It ONLY plays Civ V, but still.

Honest question, how do you play Civ 5 on an Athlon64? I played a couple of games on my Ryzen 2700X and the end game was unbearably slow, each turn took several minutes.

It runs pretty well on medium settings at 1080p. I have to move the world around a little sometimes to get the tiles to paint. So it’s not great, but turns only take a few seconds. Unfortunately, my $4,000 MBP with a Vega 20 runs it only a little better, so I keep playing it on the PC to save the thermal wear.

I commented above but I think it's because they're still on Windows 7. Significant improvements were made in Windows 10

Corporate spyware.

I have two laptops. One I own, with Windows 10, and one from work, also with Windows 10. Both Thinkpads, but not the same model.

I own the cheaper one. It’s faster.

Half the time when I reboot my windows box it will want to install updates....

My work computer is like that. It takes a while to reconnect to all the servers and get the corporate spyware up and running.

My Windows 10 PC goes from cold/dark to ready for use in, well, 20 seconds. I keep it lean.

My 1982 TI99/4a can go from boot to running a program in about 1.5 seconds, if you can hit “2” as soon as the program selector screen shows. SOLID STATE SOFTWARE

You have my upvote for "corporate spyware" :)

My Commodore 64 from the early 80s booted near instantly. Maybe 1 or 2 seconds. This was a cold boot from zero--no hibernation or standby. How far we have regressed!

I didn't realize at the time how fortunate I was to have a Tandy 1000HX when I was growing up. It was one of the only PCs I'm aware of which had DOS in ROM. Of course you were stuck with DOS 2.2 or something. But startup times were beyond almost every device I've used since, and certainly miles ahead of any PC.

Here's a quick demo from a similar Tandy model: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaSkda4XW3k

Acorn also had RISC OS in ROM. Booted in about two seconds. Yes it was tricky when you had to upgrade but I suspect the constraints made the ROMs better quality. Certainly was rare to come across bugs etc and the performance was miles ahead of the current software we have today.

I upgrade the OS for an Acorn A3000 around 30 years ago. It wasn't too bad. Carefully remove the old ROMs from their sockets and carefully push the new ROMs into the now empty sockets. Quickest OS upgrade I've ever done.

Fun fact! Risc OS is some quasi open source these days - ie you can see the source.

It's in ARM assembler.

The IBM PS/1 had MS-DOS 4.01 in ROM. You could install newer versions on the hard drive, but I remember being bitterly disappointed on installing the 2.5MB RAM expansion, because the memory test slowed the boot process down tremendously.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Everything from my TI-99/4a to my Apple IIc were basically like turning on the radio. Instant. But that's mostly because they didn't really do ANYTHING at startup.

Do you also remember waiting 5 minutes for a game to load from the insanely slow 1541 floppy drive? I'll gladly take a 10 second boot time with instant application start time over instant boot time with 5 minute application start time.

Sounds like you're still running a spinning hard drive?

I have two PCs, one with a 2.5" SSD and another with an m.2, both are ready to use with 10-15 seconds of cold boot.

But cold boot usually isn't necessary, since they sleep just fine.

I’m not sure it is necessarily the drives. My hexacore desktop spends more time in POST (or how it is called these days in uefi) than in windows boot. It takes 3s from loading the boot partition to when I can enter my password and about 20-30s before it actually decides to boot the windows EFI rom.

What annoys me isn't boot time per se, but the sluggines that permains after login as the services-not-services start up and one after another try to steal bandwidth from a WiFi that isn't yet connected.

If I could wait whatever time and then log into a usable system it'd be fine, but no, it's a minute after login before I'm in control of local resources

Counterpoint: Boot time is basically irrelevant once you have a reliable sleep/hibernate/whatever mode. My PC only reboots for windows updates or if I'm troubleshooting some inexplicable behaviour.

For the actual practical use case of sitting down at the computer and starting to use it, my PC wakes up essentially instantly. I simply don't care about boot time. My 2021 experience is far, far better than my 1998 one (well, the computer bits at least).

Mostly agree. I will concede boot time is a bit slow on 10 for me, but still faster than 95 was, and yes, it doesn't matter much because of the incredible uptime. 95 would often crash multiple times PER DAY. Meanwhile I just had my Win 10 system do an honest to goodness hard blackscreen crash a few days ago, and it was probably the first in months.

For what it's worth, I'm sure you could get the "boot" of a Win 10 machine down to almost nothing if you really wanted to. Mostly it's just not worth it.

I remember when even a cold start would drop me into a working desktop within a few seconds. Thus was in the early 90's with RISC OS running on the early days of ARM chips. Respectfully I would argue hibernation and suspend are just a band-aid for the sorry state of hardware and software today. What if we didn't need hibernation or suspend?

My Pop_OS laptop cold boots from button press to login in 8s.

How much time of these 8s is spend in EFI?

When I look at my PC it is so painful to see, that it actually spends more time with EFI than with the OS:

  $ systemd-analyze 
  Startup finished in 7.859s (firmware) + 1.203s (loader) + 1.683s (kernel) + 1.356s (initrd) + 1.431s (userspace) = 13.534s

Coreboot is the solution here, but it's just a shame so many hardware manufactures are so protective over their shitty firmware.

Why can't they just open-source whatever they crapped out, and have professional developers maintain it for them for free?

Planned obsolescence.

Mine machine only shows kernel + userspace. Even that alone adds up to 15.648 seconds.

Startup finished in 2.680s (firmware) + 826ms (loader) + 2.977s (kernel) + 12.269s (userspace) = 18.753s

I had to enter my password 3 times to login, that's most of time spent here :) (8 to 10 seconds to the login banner).

I think you have an Intel machine. For some reason, Intel machines spend large amounts of time initializing their firmware. Xeon servers spend minutes at it, while Epyc ones spends only ten seconds or so. But even Intel laptops seems slower than Ryzen ones for some reason.

Edit : I had an update and rebooted (password entered once this time :)

Startup finished in 2.557s (firmware) + 799ms (loader) + 2.901s (kernel) + 5.103s (userspace) = 11.362s graphical.target reached after 5.093s in userspace

The point is to keep all your programs open and in the same state, which might take much longer to get back to than the boot itself.

Isn't this also treating the symptom rather than providing a cure? Keeping important state only in volatile memory and hoping user clicks Ctrl+S often enough? Just resume wherever the user left off regardless if its a cold boot or not.

Androids Activity-model provides a more modern solution to this (putting its lack of multitasking aside). Did you ever think of what happens when you swap app and did you ever care about shutting off old apps? There is no need, it automatically hibernates individual apps that were not used recently but you don't notice, next time you open it magically continues exactly where you left off. Assuming developer of the app cared about state-management.

But it does play a part if you are forced through lengthy updates and reboots.

I was stuck on a 1.3mbits/s link and waited a day for a dist update that never happened.

I walked away from Windows then, and came back 6 years later. Win 10 on spinner and older hardware with 2gb ram. This originally was touted as a frugal os.

Took a day and a half of updates on a faster connection.

The machine then was so slow and CPU sucking when idle, I couldn't do anything with it. A browser would down it. Totally unusable.

Gave in, had Debian on it within an hour and it is okay with chromium, but still 2gb limits it heavily. But at least it works.

Casts mind back to win98 era, and same hardware would fly.

So if stable, and no reboots don't care so much.

They killed hibernate in Windows for a faster boot didn't they?

I have vista on a ten year laptop, and that is quite fast to boot, but now unsupported and breaks.

I know this is vaguely off topic. But main point was that boot up times aren't bothersome for stable systems with long uptime. When boot loops feel almost mandatory to get anywhere, with pretty much a virgin OS, and it takes days to actually get anywhere - it is an issue.

Actually, I liked the >1min boot times of old Linux distributions (thinking SuSE 9.0) far better than the 'you-never-know-if-you-actually-rebooted' state of modern Windows.

I think the there have been a few really important changes over the years, that make the modern computing better (like better process scheduling, that keeps your mouse smooth even when the CPU is at 100%), but the mass adoption of hibernate is not part of what I value most.

That does amaze me. I remember booting taking ages on my 166MHz Windows 98 machine. I'd press the power button and go do something else while it booted.

What used to get me was that I'd have to reboot on nearly every install/update/significant change to my PC, thus waiting hours total on just booting every month.

Not to mention just maintenance reboots because eventually the computer would just get nutty if you didn’t periodically reboot it. Some time around windows 2000 or perhaps even Vista was when you finally could run the OS for weeks without rebooting.

Seriously. From powered off to being on the internet (56k) it was like 5 minutes. Now with my SSD and modern broadband it's about 5 seconds.

It is incredible how much people's "perceptions" are altered after a mere 20 years.

I was trying to figure out why your experience is so much different from mine until I noticed you said "Win7"

You should try Windows 10. They made dramatic improvements to the boot time and my (significantly less beefy) desktop cold-boots in <10s.

Some optimized laptops are pretty insane. I just got an Asus G14 with a Ryzen 4900HS, the UEFI boot is animated and has a slicing sound and gets into desktop in maybe 5 seconds. I think I can even change the boot animation with the "ROG" button and can make the lid lights dance around unlike the lame Apple logo.

windows 10 actually does "fast startup" which is kind of like hibernation, similar to hybrid sleep introduced in the past.

They did, but they had to turn "shutdown" into some kind of "hibernate on steroid". Doing a clean boots takes a bit longer. And we're talking modern, SSD-equipped machines vs. old laptops with spinning disks.

Shutdown, Hibernate, and Sleep are three different things. I'm talking about a proper shutdown; I almost never even bother with Hibernate because a regular cold boot is fast enough

I don't think you understand the comment parent made. Windows 10 comes with a feature called Fast Boot and it is usually enabled by default depending on RAM, driver support etc. What used to be a "proper shutdown" is now a hybrid hybernate. Parts of the OS in particular related to bootup are stored in a hybernation file which is loaded at boot time resulting in faster boots. This is because Windows can now skip driver init and load state from previous boots.

I believe that cameras do that to the extreme (at least my now comically outdated G1 does that, I think): do a full reboot + hibernate on shutdown, which can take multiple seconds but which is fine because it's happening at a time when nobody is waiting for it, to then "boot up" in a fraction of a second because the system image is so small.

This is now my mental model for tricks like fast boot (which are obviously not applied to the full stack)

Honestly I've never noticed a difference on any of my Nikon DSLRs between waking up from stand-by and switching it off. (And I even had a D1 at some point!)

It's just instantly on and working. I also never noticed a difference in battery life, so I only used the on-off switch as a sort of button lock. I suspect that for Nikons that's really all it does, keep the camera from waking up from a button press.

I'd guess these use some fairly small, low power RAM that's for the "control plane", which is simply always on because power consumption is negligible, while the "data plane" is just a "dumb" ASIC with some DRAM which can turn on in a fraction of a second.

My Pana has noticeable shutdown lag (about 1.5s) suspiciously contrasting the immediate bootup/wake-up. I'd never have started suspecting that they do that hibernate trick if the shutdown started with screen-off instead of proudly (?) displaying a branded placeholder screen. Makes me wonder if maybe far more embedded systems that we know actually do have a slow boot process, but hide it in a slow shutdown that they run invisibly after screen off. If you are as curious as me, take one of your Nikon and flick the power-switch off-on quickly, that should show how deep it really went into off-ness.

If I hold the shutter down and flick the power switch on, it immediately takes a picture, if I flick back and forth it keeps taking pictures. There seems to be something like a 0.2 s delay between the click of the power switch and the clack of the shutter. That's more than the normal shutter lag (around ~50 ms for most DSLRs), but not much. If I do it two-handed I get around 2 fps out of the camera.

The Z6 mirrorless which I also have is noticeably slower. I'd say around ~1.5 seconds from the power switch to the shutter. From the noises it makes I'm guessing it is doing something with the IBIS in that extra time, which the DSLR does not have.

Power-up (remove battery, move power switch to "on" position, insert battery, observe time until meter (DSLR) or EVF (mirrorless) turns on) takes both of these around 1.5-2 seconds.

Edit: Old film Nikons also had pretty clever "power management". For example, on the Nikon FE the meter circuit is switched on and off automatically with the advance lever: If the advance lever is flush with the body, the cameras is off and the shutter is locked. Moving it to the shooting position (where it sticks about a centimeter out) the meter is powered and the shutter is unlocked. Even while advancing the film the meter is powered off. Very clever. Batteries last forever in it.

I don't know why, but I enjoy this little round of remote reverse engineering, thanks for playing along. "Cycling with shutter button pressed" is a very interesting technique, particularly when pointing at some digital stopwatch as timecode or something like that.

Another interesting specimen is the tiny RX0 I use for quick snapshots on the go, it seems to light up "services" to the screen in almost random visible order, with noticeable differences between a "doubleclick" restart and starting from settled state (e.g. screen lights up much later in the sequence on quick turnaround)

Indeed, I was referring to Fast Boot but did not recall the exact name. Thank you for providing further insight on how it works.

Too bad they also added Cortana, telemetry, advertising and all sorts of annoyances. It would be nice if there was a safe (no warez) way of disabling, or better removing all of them for good. Win 10 would still have an atrocious UI compared to everything since XP, but there are mods for that.

Cortana is basically dead. Microsoft has finally acknowledged her unpopularity. You can disable it easily in Windows. I went over my privacy settings with a fine-toothed comb. Haven't seen an ad or Candy Crush since the first few minutes of a new install. Uninstalled OneDrive since I don't use it and it's one of the bigger offenders for unwanted advertising.

Many, if not most, of Windows annoyances can be blocked without 3rd party software. It follows the usual Windows tradition of first look for a well hidden setting in Control Panel / Settings. If it's not there, look in Group Policy. And as a last resort, there's always a registry edit that can be done.

Telemetry is one of the annoyances which is trickier. I've seen methods which can be used without 3rd party software, but I personally just gave up since the most basic level doesn't send much data. And I use a Start Menu replacement since there's no other way of getting the old Start back.

To each their own, but IMO it's the best desktop UI I've ever used. Better than macOS, better than Gnome.

A sibling comment already covers how you can remove/disable nearly every preinstalled annoyance so I won't go into that

My old BBC Micro would go from 'on' to 'prompt' in under the time it would take my hand to move to the keyboard.

But then again it had a lot less in terms of hardware to deal with, memory to test and so on.

In fact the BBC Micro would “boot” in the time it takes to play two musical notes, one octave and a tone apart (double-length-B, short-C, geddit?!)

To be fair to PCs the DFS prompt was more like a boot-loader than an OS.

Hah I never noticed that those were those notes! I believe that's just a remarkable coincidence because the first, lower note is just the result of the SN76489 sound chip being powered up but "uninitialised", as it were. In theory different chips would give different tones but in practice all the ones they used seemed to give a consistent result.

I think mainly we have shifted to just never turning off computers and optimizing for standby.

> which takes upward of 40 sec to get to the desktop.

My ancient Core i5 with a whopping 4 cores gets to the Windows 10 desktop in just a few seconds.

The truth is that people care much more about features than performance -- especially system/app start up performance. Microsoft has always bet on Moore's law -- building software just not quite usable on modern hardware knowing that eventually hardware will catch up. Anyone designing software for today is immediately behind tomorrow.

My first computer was a TRS-80 and it booted faster than any computer I've owned since.

I had that for a while on my Arch Linux install. Then I set up full disk encryption. So now of my 45s boot, 20s is me typing the password, 20s is running the luks kdf, and 5s is the entire rest of the boot process.

Well, my current workstation boots in about 5 seconds, and it is not so special (NVM SSD, Linux/Ubuntu).

Maybe you misconfigured sth? I remember that I once had something bad in my systemd services, which caused a long hang waiting for nothing and then failing after 1 min timeout. https://askubuntu.com/questions/1234713/why-slow-startup-boo...

Cold boot? My computer doesn't show even the first BIOS screen in first five seconds.

Same, and Im running AMD Threadripper 3970x, 32gigs of RAM and an nVME. It takes almost 60 seconds to load.

Hmm, that sounds quite a lot longer than I'm used to these days.

I just checked, and I'm 17s from cold boot to Windows 10 login prompt on my Ryzen 2600 desktop with NVMe boot drive. I also checked on one of my 5 year-old HP Zbook G3 (Xeon E3, 64GB RAM, NVMe boot drive), and it was 23s - and that's a corporate machine, loaded with crap.

Yes, cold boot. There were some options in the BIOS (or EFI? I forgot) to skip some things, and to reduce this wait time for the BIOS hotkey.

SSD + Xubuntu + refurbished Dell optiplex FTW!

A similar thing that really opened my eyes: running Windows XP in VirtualBox on a $999 Macbook Air from 2016.

It really flies!!! It's fast to boot up and fast to use. It's more usable than the host OS !!! It even recognizes some USB devices quite well and has drivers.

In 2021, the host OS of my Macbook Air has somehow rotted, even though I installed like 4 programs on it ever, and I barely use it (I use Linux for almost all tasks). Everything is slow, with both jank and "intended" animations.

On the other hand, virtualized Windows XP is extremely responsive.

It also runs in a tiny amount of RAM -- I think I can set the VirtualBox VM to 256 MB RAM or something (don't quote me on that)

This Macbook Air has 8 GB of RAM and it's slow. I think when I got it in 2016, it was decently fast. Somehow in 2021 all the updates made it slow to a crawl. As always iTunes is a big offender. Somehow playing MP3s has to be a chore. I think Spotlight is another offender and that's something that Windows XP didn't have.

I use Ubuntu for my Linux desktop, and it has similar problems. There's lag everywhere and it uses a ton of RAM. It's not more usable from a UI perspective. I see a lot of "lateral" progress, although to be fair Ubuntu from 10-15 years ago was pretty bad (definitely less usable than Windows), and they have made progress.

I found my old 1999 T20 last year and it took around 30 seconds to boot into Win95.

I've got a video: https://twitter.com/capotribu/status/1262021068690259968

Pentium III 547 Mhz, 256 MB RAM, 12GB disk

Sadly don't remember if this video is from cold start or from hibernation

definitely hibernation

I think so considering the message on screen

That looks like Windows XP based on the desktop icons and I'm quite sure that Windows 95 didn't support hibernation, it only arrived with Windows 2000 if I recall correctly.

Windows XP only came out in 2001, so if the laptop was from 1999 then it must have been upgraded to Windows XP at some point.

That text based progress bar shows exclusively for resume from hibernate, hence rubatuga saying it's "definitely hibernation".

indeed it looks like I posted the wrong one!

I think it's Windows 2000. Unless Windows XP has that same text mode loading screen, which I don't remember.

That is XP. Seriously, just look at the icons....

And yes, XP has exactly the same boot screen. It just goes significantly faster than on 2k, which means most of the time you didn't get to see it.

Both Windows XP and 2000 normally showed a graphical loading screen.

The text mode loader would only ever appear when resuming from hibernate.

If you're using Win7, it's not taking full advantage of your SSD to boot fast. Win8/10 will boot much faster.

I have used Win10 as well, about the same boot time.

Not sure what you are doing, my win 10 box boots to desktop in around 10 seconds if that

My personal Window 10 box boots within 10 seconds. My corporate laptop takes an eternity despite being more powerful.

I suspect configuration (software and hardware) has a massive impact which is being glossed over.

Well yes, corporate machines are a different issue.

I have a corporate mac that's sluggish due to mcafee chewing 100% CPU for 5 minute intervals, anything with "enterprise" management software on it is going to suck regardless of OS.

Just wait until you see windows 10 on a 2GB machine with mcafee, and then corona forces ms teams on it. Boot takes 15 minutes to usable. Usable means msword produces a character on the screen in less than 10 seconds after you type it.

IT closed the users ticket without action: As long as it boots in 15 minutes or less, there is no performance problem.

Yeah I have a Mac Book with 32G iof RAM and 8/16 cores and always five or so of the top 7 processes for CPU are spy ware. Unless I do a massive multi account terraform apply - that can outcompete them. Even compiling doesn’t, go is so fast.

I have to concur with the other commenters, it sounds like your system might have some kind of strange configuration. I haven't had a computer that took longer than around 10 seconds to boot since Windows 7. SSDs made a massive difference. Then Windows 8 introduced hybrid boot for certain configurations, and Windows 10 made it pretty much standard. My Android phone (Pixel) takes longer to boot than my Windows computer (Surface).

I think it's worth mentioning the reason for this is mostly because of the fast boot feature, which means Windows is actually just leaving hibernation opposed to cold booting.

In my experience as a performance engineer, slow performance in things like boot isn't because of "bloat", it's just because of random bugs that may or may not correlate to having added more features. There is a tradeoff in development time between features and bug fixing of course.

weird, I got a much smaller workstation (like dual core and 10 Gb of RAM) and I get to the desktop in ~ 10 seconds. Maybe Windows is spinning up each core one after the other?

It's less likely to be the amount of cores but rather the amount of RAM actually.

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