26 ms·

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 trouble

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).

ergot_vacation 6y ago
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.
kiwijamo 6y ago
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?
- wazoox 6y ago
  My Pop_OS laptop cold boots from button press to login in 8s.
  - arendtio 6y ago
    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
    - executesorder66 6y ago
      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?
      - pwdisswordfish8 6y ago
        Planned obsolescence.
    - kiwijamo 6y ago
      Mine machine only shows kernel + userspace. Even that alone adds up to 15.648 seconds.
    - wazoox 6y ago
      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 Login banner appeared a little less than 8s after boot.
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  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.
  - Too 6y ago
    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.
molasses 6y ago
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.
- molasses 6y ago
  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.
arendtio 6y ago
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.

ergot_vacation 6y ago

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.

kiwijamo 6y ago

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?

wazoox 6y ago
My Pop_OS laptop cold boots from button press to login in 8s.
- arendtio 6y ago
  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
  - executesorder66 6y ago
    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?
    - pwdisswordfish8 6y ago
      Planned obsolescence.
  - kiwijamo 6y ago
    Mine machine only shows kernel + userspace. Even that alone adds up to 15.648 seconds.
  - wazoox 6y ago
    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 Login banner appeared a little less than 8s after boot.
BlueTemplar 6y ago
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.
- Too 6y ago
  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.

molasses 6y ago

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.

molasses 6y ago
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.

arendtio 6y ago

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.