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) boo

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.