5 ms·

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

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
  If you see the BIOS screen, then it isn't suspended. It could still be suspend-to-disk, but desktop PCs don't do that. Windows 'fast boot' does work by saving some critical state on shutdown, but it's still a complete shutdown.
  - genewitch 2y ago
    when booting my 5950x into windows, i never see the bios screen. It's about 50/50 if i see the nvidia bios screen, then i see the motherboard logo with the windows spinner under it. there's about 500ms where i can push F2 or whatever between when the logo shows up and the spinner shows up that i can "enter bios" - but that itself takes about 5 seconds to become fully realized on the screen. I know of what you speak, but i don't know if this is universally true.
    - fennecbutt 2y ago
      The motherboard or manufacturer logo is the bios running... For example on xps, bios is now just when the plain dell logo displays. Thank Apple for that sort of thing.
  - lproven 2y ago
    > Windows 'fast boot' does work by saving some critical state on shutdown, but it's still a complete shutdown. Nope. The easy way to falsify this is to dual-boot. If you have Windows Fast Boot enabled, Linux will not be able to mount Windows's NTFS drives, because they are still mounted. This tells us the kernel is just hibernated, not stopped. This is one of my personal annoyances with systemd: if a drive in `/etc/fstab` isn't available, systemd waits for it to become available... forever. So if a drive is mounted (because another OS is hibernated), or it's changed UUID because it's been reformatted, or it's been deleted: your computer won't boot, because systemd is trapped in a retry loop. The easy way to disable fast boot is just to open an Admin Command Prompt and type: powercfg /h off This disables Hibernation. The `C:\HIBERFIL.SYS` file is deleted and Windows now will do a full shutdown and full boot every time... and when you boot into Linux, you can now mount the Windows drives. Note, with hibernation as opposed to suspend, you still see the BIOS screen.
    - Filligree 2y ago
      That's the exact state I was talking about... but you did go into more detail. :)
formerly_proven 2y ago
> Windows is pretty fast nowdays on modern hardware This feels the wrong way around. Windows development just stagnated for about a decade while hardware made huge leaps, so hardware speed increased much faster than Windows became slower. Therefore, "Windows is pretty fast nowadays on modern hardware". I remember Windows XP being able to boot from a hard drive without the progress bar making two full revolutions (so, like, 3-4 seconds?). Windows 7 managed to do something similar (finish booting before the animated Windows logo has fully "bloomed"), but already required an SSD and a multi-GHz multi-core processor to do so. Windows 10 does a few spinny spins, but uses a CPU that's another integer multiple faster and an NVMe SSD delivering hundreds of thousands of IOPS and gigabytes per second of bandwidth.

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
If you see the BIOS screen, then it isn't suspended. It could still be suspend-to-disk, but desktop PCs don't do that. Windows 'fast boot' does work by saving some critical state on shutdown, but it's still a complete shutdown.
- genewitch 2y ago
  when booting my 5950x into windows, i never see the bios screen. It's about 50/50 if i see the nvidia bios screen, then i see the motherboard logo with the windows spinner under it. there's about 500ms where i can push F2 or whatever between when the logo shows up and the spinner shows up that i can "enter bios" - but that itself takes about 5 seconds to become fully realized on the screen. I know of what you speak, but i don't know if this is universally true.
  - fennecbutt 2y ago
    The motherboard or manufacturer logo is the bios running... For example on xps, bios is now just when the plain dell logo displays. Thank Apple for that sort of thing.
- lproven 2y ago
  > Windows 'fast boot' does work by saving some critical state on shutdown, but it's still a complete shutdown. Nope. The easy way to falsify this is to dual-boot. If you have Windows Fast Boot enabled, Linux will not be able to mount Windows's NTFS drives, because they are still mounted. This tells us the kernel is just hibernated, not stopped. This is one of my personal annoyances with systemd: if a drive in `/etc/fstab` isn't available, systemd waits for it to become available... forever. So if a drive is mounted (because another OS is hibernated), or it's changed UUID because it's been reformatted, or it's been deleted: your computer won't boot, because systemd is trapped in a retry loop. The easy way to disable fast boot is just to open an Admin Command Prompt and type: powercfg /h off This disables Hibernation. The `C:\HIBERFIL.SYS` file is deleted and Windows now will do a full shutdown and full boot every time... and when you boot into Linux, you can now mount the Windows drives. Note, with hibernation as opposed to suspend, you still see the BIOS screen.
  - Filligree 2y ago
    That's the exact state I was talking about... but you did go into more detail. :)

formerly_proven 2y ago

> Windows is pretty fast nowdays on modern hardware This feels the wrong way around. Windows development just stagnated for about a decade while hardware made huge leaps, so hardware speed increased much faster than Windows became slower. Therefore, "Windows is pretty fast nowadays on modern hardware". I remember Windows XP being able to boot from a hard drive without the progress bar making two full revolutions (so, like, 3-4 seconds?). Windows 7 managed to do something similar (finish booting before the animated Windows logo has fully "bloomed"), but already required an SSD and a multi-GHz multi-core processor to do so. Windows 10 does a few spinny spins, but uses a CPU that's another integer multiple faster and an NVMe SSD delivering hundreds of thousands of IOPS and gigabytes per second of bandwidth.