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Comment by Yhippa | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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.

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.

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