7 ms·

IMHO boot times of Linux distros in general are rather sad, which is then significantly amplified on weak(er) hardware such as this. I've gone through similar e

IMHO boot times of Linux distros in general are rather sad, which is then significantly amplified on weak(er) hardware such as this. I've gone through similar efforts with the MQ-Pro SBC. One can also really feel this on laptops (except Macbooks I guess). Annoying.

lionkor 2y ago
It very much depends what you define as "boot time". For example, Windows optimizes for time to fist UI, meanwhile everything else continues to load and the PC stays unusable for multiple seconds after "boot".
- pandemic_region 2y ago
  sorry man but that typo had me lol, early mornings here I do apologize.
- layoric 2y ago
  Exactly my experience as well. I moved away from Windows (10) earlier this year, and login times (waiting for the user desktop to come up after putting in credentials) took ~10 seconds. Sometimes it was faster after a fresh install, but it never lasted, even when regularly managing what services and apps were loaded on startup.
- gerdesj 2y ago
  "Windows optimizes for time to fist UI," 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.
  - pbhjpbhj 2y ago
    The principal menu is still bottom left doing what they clearly see as most important thing in the OS, advertising shit and feeding you heavily politicised propaganda. So useful!
- genewitch 2y ago
  you all reboot windows? madness. 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.
  - kiwijamo 2y ago
    Windows is pretty fast nowdays on modern hardware (especially if it's booting off an SSD drive) and Debian/GNOME is also pretty fast to a desktop as well. Slow boots off a SSD drive would point at an issue somewhere regardless of your OS. 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.
    - genewitch 2y ago
      I almost want to test this out - shut down my PC, unplug it, hit the power button, wait like 15 minutes, then turn it back on. Will it still be "pretty fast"? My (probably wrong) understanding was windows boot times are so fast because it's really just hibernating when you shut down. I'm sure there's technical names for the power state (S0?) - but ram is kept "warm" so that resume basically just needs to check that all the devices it needs are connected and reset the software clock. 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.
      - Filligree 2y ago
- kiwijamo 2y ago
  This is frequently due to startup apps, not Windows itself. I generally find when I disable stuff like Steam, Teams, Creative Cloud, OEM (e.g. HP) software, etc Windows is usable as soon as I log on. My work Windows laptop has most startup apps disabled (with the exception of OneDrive and Teams which I use frequently enough that it makes sense for it to be enabled on my work laptop) and I log on to a desktop ready to go. My personal laptop has everything except OneDrive disabled. YMMV and I acknowledge the default settings of letting apps insert themselves as Startup apps without user approval is not ideal. I note this is also an issue on MacOS from experience at my previous employer who issued me a Macbook which was configured as per corporate policy to have various apps including anti virus and the like loading on login to desktop. Only platforms that is so far immune to this is open source distros like Debian (using GNOME, its default desktop environment) et al but I've yet to work for an employer that uses Linux.
- nox101 2y ago
  My Windows box starts fast, gets to login in moments, and is usable immediately. Are you sure you don't have a bunch of extra software set to run at startup? Steam? Adobe Creative Cloud? Oculus Support? 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.
- NavinF 2y ago
  When I reboot my Windows PC every 3 months or so, I can start using it as soon as the desktop shows up. No slowdown. I have 5800x3d/64GB/2TB/4090. I don't have any startup apps other than the ones that come built-in with enterprise edition. Why do you have such a different experience?
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    > 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.
    - NavinF 2y ago
      Guy goes into the doctor's office. Says, "Doctor, it hurts when I do this. " You know what the doctor says? "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
    - baq 2y ago
      I'm pretty sure crowdstrike and its competitors can slow down any computer regardless of the OS to the point of uselessness.
- Avamander 2y ago
  I consider boot time from power off until I can start the first application I want. 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.
  - FireBeyond 2y ago
    > Why should a regular desktop distro wait around five seconds for networking and NTP before displaying login 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.
    - Avamander 2y ago
      So those who need that should configure their systems as such and the majority should get to enjoy faster boot times?
nox101 2y ago
> except Macbooks I guess??? 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.
- rafram 2y ago
  There’s something wrong with your M1 MacBook. I’ve used three and none of them has taken longer than 20-30 seconds from power button to desktop.
  - nox101 2y ago
    20-30 seconds is much longer than the ~6 seconds for my Windows PC. Old article but: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fastest-windows-10-boot-time,5810.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fastest-windows-10-boot...
    - rafram 2y ago
      IMO having Windows Fast Boot enabled is cheating.
      - fennecbutt 2y ago
        Would it be cheating if an equivalent Apple technology was enabled?
  - sigseg1v 2y ago
    20-30s seems extremely slow but I'm not normally using a Mac. Anecdotally on Linux and Windows systems I commonly see 6-10 seconds on a hard reset with absolutely no optimizations
    - callalex 2y ago
      It takes a while to verify all the signatures in every chip to make sure you didn’t do something evil like repair your own hardware.
nextos 2y ago
I'm confused by this statement. For me Linux boot is incredibly fast, even on old machines with slow storage. For example, my MacBook Air 11 (running Linux) boots to login so fast I barely see any boot logs. systemd-analyze reports the graphical target is reached in < 4 s. 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 https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/EFISTUB.
- Avamander 2y ago
  > 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). > I'm confused by this statement. Should you be confused?
deivid 2y ago
Linux can boot quite quickly with the right settings, I've written about it at [0], but distros (reasonably) build very generic kernels and initramfs, which are not particularly fast to boot [0]: https://blog.davidv.dev/posts/minimizing-linux-boot-times/ https://blog.davidv.dev/posts/minimizing-linux-boot-times/
PhilipRoman 2y ago
I'm not sure how much distros can do here, the userspace part of boot time is negligible (unless there is some horrible misconfiguration, like networkmanager waiting 90 seconds for nonexistent wifi...). My linux box takes about 4 seconds until graphical.target, most of which is connecting to wifi and ntpd, both of which are optional in principle. 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.
- Avamander 2y ago
  > My linux box takes about 4 seconds until graphical.target, most of which is connecting to wifi and ntpd, both of which are optional in principle. 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.
  - PhilipRoman 2y ago
    Login screen doesn't wait for graphical.target, its the other way around - display manager must be started for graphical.target to be complete. So in my case, ly-dm started 3 seconds into boot and it doesn't depend on anything significant. Either way, the broader point is that even if distros somehow managed to cut the time in half, thats still just 2 seconds compared to the massive time needed for firmware. 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.

lionkor 2y ago

It very much depends what you define as "boot time". For example, Windows optimizes for time to fist UI, meanwhile everything else continues to load and the PC stays unusable for multiple seconds after "boot".

pandemic_region 2y ago
sorry man but that typo had me lol, early mornings here I do apologize.
layoric 2y ago
Exactly my experience as well. I moved away from Windows (10) earlier this year, and login times (waiting for the user desktop to come up after putting in credentials) took ~10 seconds. Sometimes it was faster after a fresh install, but it never lasted, even when regularly managing what services and apps were loaded on startup.
gerdesj 2y ago
"Windows optimizes for time to fist UI," 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.
- pbhjpbhj 2y ago
  The principal menu is still bottom left doing what they clearly see as most important thing in the OS, advertising shit and feeding you heavily politicised propaganda. So useful!
genewitch 2y ago
you all reboot windows? madness. 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.
- kiwijamo 2y ago
  Windows is pretty fast nowdays on modern hardware (especially if it's booting off an SSD drive) and Debian/GNOME is also pretty fast to a desktop as well. Slow boots off a SSD drive would point at an issue somewhere regardless of your OS. 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.
  - genewitch 2y ago
    I almost want to test this out - shut down my PC, unplug it, hit the power button, wait like 15 minutes, then turn it back on. Will it still be "pretty fast"? My (probably wrong) understanding was windows boot times are so fast because it's really just hibernating when you shut down. I'm sure there's technical names for the power state (S0?) - but ram is kept "warm" so that resume basically just needs to check that all the devices it needs are connected and reset the software clock. 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.
    - Filligree 2y ago
kiwijamo 2y ago
This is frequently due to startup apps, not Windows itself. I generally find when I disable stuff like Steam, Teams, Creative Cloud, OEM (e.g. HP) software, etc Windows is usable as soon as I log on. My work Windows laptop has most startup apps disabled (with the exception of OneDrive and Teams which I use frequently enough that it makes sense for it to be enabled on my work laptop) and I log on to a desktop ready to go. My personal laptop has everything except OneDrive disabled. YMMV and I acknowledge the default settings of letting apps insert themselves as Startup apps without user approval is not ideal. I note this is also an issue on MacOS from experience at my previous employer who issued me a Macbook which was configured as per corporate policy to have various apps including anti virus and the like loading on login to desktop. Only platforms that is so far immune to this is open source distros like Debian (using GNOME, its default desktop environment) et al but I've yet to work for an employer that uses Linux.
nox101 2y ago
My Windows box starts fast, gets to login in moments, and is usable immediately. Are you sure you don't have a bunch of extra software set to run at startup? Steam? Adobe Creative Cloud? Oculus Support? 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.
NavinF 2y ago
When I reboot my Windows PC every 3 months or so, I can start using it as soon as the desktop shows up. No slowdown. I have 5800x3d/64GB/2TB/4090. I don't have any startup apps other than the ones that come built-in with enterprise edition. Why do you have such a different experience?
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  > 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.
  - NavinF 2y ago
    Guy goes into the doctor's office. Says, "Doctor, it hurts when I do this. " You know what the doctor says? "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
  - baq 2y ago
    I'm pretty sure crowdstrike and its competitors can slow down any computer regardless of the OS to the point of uselessness.
Avamander 2y ago
I consider boot time from power off until I can start the first application I want. 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.
- FireBeyond 2y ago
  > Why should a regular desktop distro wait around five seconds for networking and NTP before displaying login 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.
  - Avamander 2y ago
    So those who need that should configure their systems as such and the majority should get to enjoy faster boot times?

nox101 2y ago

> except Macbooks I guess??? 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.

rafram 2y ago
There’s something wrong with your M1 MacBook. I’ve used three and none of them has taken longer than 20-30 seconds from power button to desktop.
- nox101 2y ago
  20-30 seconds is much longer than the ~6 seconds for my Windows PC. Old article but: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fastest-windows-10-boot-time,5810.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fastest-windows-10-boot...
  - rafram 2y ago
    IMO having Windows Fast Boot enabled is cheating.
    - fennecbutt 2y ago
      Would it be cheating if an equivalent Apple technology was enabled?
- sigseg1v 2y ago
  20-30s seems extremely slow but I'm not normally using a Mac. Anecdotally on Linux and Windows systems I commonly see 6-10 seconds on a hard reset with absolutely no optimizations
  - callalex 2y ago
    It takes a while to verify all the signatures in every chip to make sure you didn’t do something evil like repair your own hardware.

nextos 2y ago

I'm confused by this statement. For me Linux boot is incredibly fast, even on old machines with slow storage. For example, my MacBook Air 11 (running Linux) boots to login so fast I barely see any boot logs. systemd-analyze reports the graphical target is reached in < 4 s. 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 https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/EFISTUB.

Avamander 2y ago
> 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). > I'm confused by this statement. Should you be confused?

deivid 2y ago

Linux can boot quite quickly with the right settings, I've written about it at [0], but distros (reasonably) build very generic kernels and initramfs, which are not particularly fast to boot [0]: https://blog.davidv.dev/posts/minimizing-linux-boot-times/ https://blog.davidv.dev/posts/minimizing-linux-boot-times/

PhilipRoman 2y ago

I'm not sure how much distros can do here, the userspace part of boot time is negligible (unless there is some horrible misconfiguration, like networkmanager waiting 90 seconds for nonexistent wifi...). My linux box takes about 4 seconds until graphical.target, most of which is connecting to wifi and ntpd, both of which are optional in principle. 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.

Avamander 2y ago
> My linux box takes about 4 seconds until graphical.target, most of which is connecting to wifi and ntpd, both of which are optional in principle. 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.
- PhilipRoman 2y ago
  Login screen doesn't wait for graphical.target, its the other way around - display manager must be started for graphical.target to be complete. So in my case, ly-dm started 3 seconds into boot and it doesn't depend on anything significant. Either way, the broader point is that even if distros somehow managed to cut the time in half, thats still just 2 seconds compared to the massive time needed for firmware. 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.