Using macOS [current] as an example (as you did), Terminal opens faster than I can react - from ⌘-space ter to typing in Terminal is under half a second If I c

Using macOS [current] as an example (as you did), Terminal opens faster than I can react - from ⌘-space ter to typing in Terminal is under half a second If I click it, it's up in under half a bounce Word takes longer to open ... but it's also a pretty big application Likewise Firefox takes several bounces (but it's recovering whoknowshowmany tabs I left open when i closed it) Boot time on my [first generation] M1-based MBP is faster than anything I can recall running that's anywhere near "modern" (distinctly disingenuous to compare book time on a Mac Classic or SE30 to a modern system - yes, that 30-year-old device started "fast" ... but it also wasn't doing much!) Even with all the items I have set to come up at boot (about a dozen utilities on this machine), I'm able to start working pretty quickly after a reboot's initiated (which I also only ever do for OS updates that mandate it) And any time that's "too long to wait through" I mitigate the same way waiting on my dishwasher to be done cleaning dishes: I go do something else (grab a coffee, make a call...) Your first three things to check regardless of OS: - storage speed (is it a spinny 5400rpm drive? NVMe? SATA SSD?) - RAM - the old mantra is as true today as it's ever been - the more the merrier - CPU speed and core count ... this one is more nebulous: ARM is different from x86-64 is different from SPARC etc; even various flavors of each of those CPU families are different from each other! An AMD 64-core with 768MB cache is going to be a lot different from its sibling offering that only has 256MB cache As for a random, modern OS that is "lean" ... check OpenBSD, NetBSD, or Haiku-OS (the opensource reimplementation and modernization of BeOS from yesteryear) But those "lean" OSes are going to need a lot of "deleaning" to get them into a state most people want to use (perhaps excepting Haiku) - on Linux, you can pick a lightweight desktop environment ... but the impact on performance (unless you're on a pretty low-resource device) of running fwvm, say, over KDE is nearly indistinguishable - because you're not spending most of your time interacting with the OS, per se - you're interacting with some set of applications on top of the OS The OS, largely, is irrelevant - choosing any specific OS comes down to three rational factors (and then a bunch of personal preferences): - does it run what I need it to? - can I afford it? - can I interoperate well-enough with my friends/colleagues/etc to use this hardware and OS vs that OS and hardware? I wish I could run Haiku full-time...But it does not [yet] support many applications I have to have access to (and the web-based versions of them won't run reliably on the browsers available for the OS [yet])