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Comment by cj | Hacker News Reader

For me it’s things like boot speed. How long does it take to restart the computer. To log out, and log back in with all my apps opening.

Mac on intel feels like it was about 2x slower at these basic functions. (I don’t have real data points)

Intel Mac had lag when opening apps. Silicon Mac is instant and always responsive.

No idea how that compares to Linux.

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Windows can boot pretty fast these days, I'm always surprised by it. I run LTSC on mine though, so zero bloat. Both my Macs and Windows LTSC have quick boots nowadays, I'm not sure I could say which is faster, but it might be the Windows.

It can boot and show a desktop fast after logging in. However, after that it seems still to be doing a lot in the background. If I try to open up Firefox, or any other app, immediately after I see the desktop it will take forever to load. When I let the desktop sit for a minute and then open Firefox it opens instantly.

Presumably a whole bunch of services are still being (lazy?) loaded.

On the other hand, my cachyos install takes a bit longer to boot, but after it jumps to the desktop all apps that are autostart just jump into view instantly.

Most time on boot seems to be spent on initializing drives and finding the right boot drive and load it.

> For me it’s things like boot speed

This is a metric I never really understood. how often are people booting? The only time I ever reboot a machine is if I have to. For instance the laptop I'm on right now has an uptime of just under 100 days.

My Mac - couldn’t tell you, I just close the lid. My work laptop? Probably every day, as it makes its own mind up what it does when you close the lid. Even the “shut down” button in the start menu often restarts the machine in win 11.

My work desktop? Every day, and it takes > 30 seconds to go from off to desktop, and probably another minute or two for things like Docker to decide that they’ve actually started up.

Back in the bad old days of Intel Macs, I had a full system crash just as I was about to get up to give a presentation in class.

It rebooted and got to desktop, restoring all my open windows and app state, before I got to the podium (it was a very small room).

The Mac OS itself seems to be relatively fast to boot, the desktop environment does a good job recovering from failures, and now the underlying hardware is screaming fast.

I should never have to reboot, but in the rare instances when it happens, being fast can be a difference maker.

Well, completely rebooting is a lot slower on my Macs than on my Linux.

But I'm running a fairly slim Archlinux install without a desktop environment or anything like that. (It's just XMonad as a window manager.)

What hardware? Up until a recent BIOS update my X870 board 9950X3D spent 3 minutes of a cold boot training the RAM… then booting up the OS in 4-8 seconds, so my Mac would always win these comparisons. Now it still takes a while at first boot, but subsequent reboots are snappy.

Hmm? Why do you restart your computer often enough to notice?

Even Windows (or at least my install that doesn't have any crap besides visual studio on it) can run for weeks these days...

My work laptop decided probably once a week to not go to sleep and just run its battery to 0.

My work PC will decide to not idle and will spin up fans arbitrarily in the evenings so I shut it down when I’m not using it.

> My work laptop decided probably once a week to not go to sleep and just run its battery to 0.

That reminds me that if Apple annoys me enough to switch back to linux at my main OS it will hurt on laptops :(

Some of that can be attributed to faster IO.

Something else to consider: chromebook on arm boots significantly faster than dito intel. Yes, nowadays Mediateks latest cpus wipe the floor with intel N-whatever, but it has been like this since the early days when the Arm version was relatively underpowered.

Why? I have no idea.

My guess would be that ARM Chromebooks might run substantially more cut-down firmware? While intel might need a more full-fat EFI stack? But I haven't used either and am just speculating.

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