It does not take 8.5 seconds on my machine, the author must have a slow machine (no SSD?). I just tested and I can launch a full qubes VM in about 3.5 seconds.

It does not take 8.5 seconds on my machine, the author must have a slow machine (no SSD?). I just tested and I can launch a full qubes VM in about 3.5 seconds. This is for a pretty-much-default qubes fedora template. Disposable VMs are much faster, because they are essentially hibernated, and the hibernation image is stored in RAM. So there I can boot and launch firefox in about 2 seconds (really doesn't feel any slower than launching firefox on any other system). Qubes is trying to provide a pretty bog-standard linux machine in the VMs, so as to be the most useful. They do have their own kernel, but I haven't looked at how stripped down it is.