I'm going to apologise right now for giggling at your typo. Microsoft have done some horrible things to UI.
The start menu - yes they created the fucking thing, yes it is now called start by everyone - own it (think Biro and co and stop being dicks) and it belongs at the left hand side. "We" know better than you, lets put it in the middle and surround it with weird shit and lets make it odd and put fucking games controllers on a corporate laptop and other wankery that we can't be bothered to curate because we are so poor but if you love our weather forecasts and shitty ... whomever will pay us .. whatever thing.
I think that Microsoft have lost interest in humanity as anything than a pool of subscription slaves to contribute to their bottom line.
That is some pretty aggressive fisting.
I got devuan down to about 8 seconds from startup -> login -> shutdown on the tty. Gentoo boots pretty fast to a desktop (maybe 15-20 seconds) - a lot of the slowdown on "modern" linux is systemd waiting for NICs and whatever to quiesce. Hilariously, Ubuntu is by far the worst at boot times, i've had ubuntu sit there for minutes because it was airgapped.
I kinda lost interest in attempting to speed up boots more than that, maybe if i had some funding i could get debian or gentoo down to a couple of seconds of boot overhead before X/wayland/whatever runs.
I generally do shutdown on my gaming tower PC as the idle power usage isn't great and shutdown/boot is fast enough that it's not much difference compared to suspend. Laptops though I just suspend -- I often get weeks of uptime in Windows.
I'm currently showing 50.6GB "in use" and 62GB commit on my windows machine. My boot drive is an intel SSD on sata, less than a GB/second - this implies if windows does recover memory from disk on "cold" boot my machine will take about a minute to restore RAM.
i may be conflating things, but i've lived with this assumption that shutting down my PC is merely hibernating it, and as such, i always pull mains power before removing hardware.
It could still be suspend-to-disk, but desktop PCs don't do that.
Windows 'fast boot' does work by saving some critical state on shutdown, but it's still a complete shutdown.
I know of what you speak, but i don't know if this is universally true.
For example on xps, bios is now just when the plain dell logo displays. Thank Apple for that sort of thing.
Nope.
The easy way to falsify this is to dual-boot.
If you have Windows Fast Boot enabled, Linux will not be able to mount Windows's NTFS drives, because they are still mounted. This tells us the kernel is just hibernated, not stopped.
This is one of my personal annoyances with systemd: if a drive in `/etc/fstab` isn't available, systemd waits for it to become available... forever. So if a drive is mounted (because another OS is hibernated), or it's changed UUID because it's been reformatted, or it's been deleted: your computer won't boot, because systemd is trapped in a retry loop.
The easy way to disable fast boot is just to open an Admin Command Prompt and type:
powercfg /h off
This disables Hibernation. The `C:\HIBERFIL.SYS` file is deleted and Windows now will do a full shutdown and full boot every time... and when you boot into Linux, you can now mount the Windows drives.
Note, with hibernation as opposed to suspend, you still see the BIOS screen.
This feels the wrong way around. Windows development just stagnated for about a decade while hardware made huge leaps, so hardware speed increased much faster than Windows became slower. Therefore, "Windows is pretty fast nowadays on modern hardware".
I remember Windows XP being able to boot from a hard drive without the progress bar making two full revolutions (so, like, 3-4 seconds?).
Windows 7 managed to do something similar (finish booting before the animated Windows logo has fully "bloomed"), but already required an SSD and a multi-GHz multi-core processor to do so.
Windows 10 does a few spinny spins, but uses a CPU that's another integer multiple faster and an NVMe SSD delivering hundreds of thousands of IOPS and gigabytes per second of bandwidth.
My corp Mac actually has this issue as it launches some security software, launches the browser, checks that apps are up to date and security patches are applied etc. It takes several seconds (10-20?) before it's ready to use.
Why do you have such a different experience?
Well...
> I don't have any startup apps other than the ones that come built-in with enterprise edition.
There is the matter where 99% of people aren't on enterprise, and of the 1% who are, virtually all are running it laden with a pile of corporate garbage.
"Don't do that"
Seriously tho, anyone can activate enterprise edition with MAS. And even if you're on home edition, why would it take longer to boot up? All the crap is on your SSD, not your RAM
But I am a bit strict about what I consider slow on modern hardware though. Why should a regular desktop distro wait around five seconds for networking and NTP before displaying login, or why should it take UEFI 5s to start the OS. I can forgive SBCs running off an SD card taking 15-30 seconds to boot, but not a PC that's significantly faster in all other aspects.
I'm not even going to start with all the crap that starts on an average Windows desktop. It's disgusting.
Well, for one, there may be a Kerberos ticket based auth system in place that requires accurate time. Or for AD on the Windows side.
My M1 MacBook takes an order of magnitude longer to start than my Windows Desktop PC. Once it's started up, leaving it on re-logging in takes no time but rebooting takes a while.
Old article but:
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fastest-windows-10-boot...
But then, with some macOS update, they screwed it up and never bothered to fix it. Imagine how fast those things could boot with their super fast drives and SOCs if someone fixed this regression…
[0]: https://blog.davidv.dev/posts/minimizing-linux-boot-times/
If you really want a fast boot, ditch all the bootloader compatibility layers, abstractions and dynamic configuration possibilities like initramfs. But then you would be at the mercy of the hardware vendor, which is definitely not worth it.
But why should a login screen wait behind networking target for example? That ordering is up to the distributions.
> If you really want a fast boot, ditch all the bootloader compatibility layers, abstractions and dynamic configuration possibilities like initramfs. But then you would be at the mercy of the hardware vendor, which is definitely not worth it.
You'd expect that would be the case with SBCs, most if not all do overlays instead of ACPI. Very few also offer UEFI, so there isn't a slow(er) layer there either, but you are at the mercy of the vendor.
The only thing that pops out is systemd-binfmt.service somehow taking almost 1 second, which is strange since AFAIK it just echoes some strings into /proc file. There is still some room for optimization by mounting external drives asynchronously but that's not a safe optimization to make for general use.
Two things seem to be key here. I don't use a desktop environment. I either boot in text mode (and then startx as needed), or I boot to X with a lightweight login manager (lightdm). The important bit is that no DE reduces the number of services by an order of magnitude, which put a lot of I/O pressure during boot on old hardware. The booted system is less than 200 MB, even when running X. The second thing that can speed things up is EFI stub: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/EFISTUB.
> I'm confused by this statement.
Should you be confused?