3 ms·

As someone who just installed the beta 2 on my laptop a few days ago, I have to say I'm impressed. This thing cold boots on my non-UEFI laptop in 4-5 seconds.

As someone who just installed the beta 2 on my laptop a few days ago, I have to say I'm impressed. This thing cold boots on my non-UEFI laptop in 4-5 seconds. That's at the same level as Windows 8.1, which also impressed me greatly. Now if they can only get systemd and the "online in 50ms" updates implemented, this thing will be super-sweet.

nine_k 13y ago
BTW I wonder why cold-boot time is so important. All my machines go back from hibernation pretty fast (in under a second), and I only cold-boot if I update something major, like the kernel or the hardware itself. What's the point to shut down your machine, and either lose your session or wait considerable time while it restores?
- josteink 13y ago
  Cold boot is not really that important in itself, but it's a good measure of how much needless cruft is being loaded on your system. If it boots almost instantly, you can be certain you don't have a million unneeded processes draining your battery life. If it spends 30 seconds before you get to the login screen on good hardware, there's no telling how much things are going on and how it will affect your battery life. A fast boot process is also telling about good engineering in general, as it implies more things are decoupled and can be loaded independently, instead of being queued in a one-by-one sequence. So in itself, a fast boot is not that important, but when they manage to cut it in two compared to what I'm used to, that gives me confidence they are doing the right things in general.
- kevinbowman 13y ago
  The biggest speed-up to my cold-boot time was when I switched to SSD - time from grub to login screen is now just a few seconds. Interestingly, that changed my usage habits; I started shutting down my laptop more often and therefore had fewer problems with peripherals not initialising properly after waking from hibernate (eg sometimes my touchpad would move the mouse pointer rotated at 90 degrees), but mostly I started booting into my Windows partition more often instead of using Wine etc to try to run programs. A faster boot time made it more trivial to switch between boot options, which I see as a good thing.

nine_k 13y ago

BTW I wonder why cold-boot time is so important. All my machines go back from hibernation pretty fast (in under a second), and I only cold-boot if I update something major, like the kernel or the hardware itself. What's the point to shut down your machine, and either lose your session or wait considerable time while it restores?

josteink 13y ago
Cold boot is not really that important in itself, but it's a good measure of how much needless cruft is being loaded on your system. If it boots almost instantly, you can be certain you don't have a million unneeded processes draining your battery life. If it spends 30 seconds before you get to the login screen on good hardware, there's no telling how much things are going on and how it will affect your battery life. A fast boot process is also telling about good engineering in general, as it implies more things are decoupled and can be loaded independently, instead of being queued in a one-by-one sequence. So in itself, a fast boot is not that important, but when they manage to cut it in two compared to what I'm used to, that gives me confidence they are doing the right things in general.
kevinbowman 13y ago
The biggest speed-up to my cold-boot time was when I switched to SSD - time from grub to login screen is now just a few seconds. Interestingly, that changed my usage habits; I started shutting down my laptop more often and therefore had fewer problems with peripherals not initialising properly after waking from hibernate (eg sometimes my touchpad would move the mouse pointer rotated at 90 degrees), but mostly I started booting into my Windows partition more often instead of using Wine etc to try to run programs. A faster boot time made it more trivial to switch between boot options, which I see as a good thing.