Ask Slashdot: What's Your Boot Time? 137
How much time does it take to even begin booting, asks long-time Slashdot reader BrendaEM. Say you want separate Windows and Linux boot processes, and "You have Windows on one SSD/NVMe, and Linux on another. How long do you have to wait for a chance to choose a boot drive?"
And more importantly, why is it all taking so long? In a world of 4-5 GHz CPU's that are thousands of times faster than they were, has hardware become thousands of times more complicated, to warrant the longer start time? Is this a symptom of a larger UEFI bloat problem? Now with memory characterization on some modern motherboards... how long do you have to wait to find out if your RAM is incompatible, or your system is dead on arrival?
Share your own experiences (and system specs) in the comments. How long is it taking you to choose a boot drive?
And what's your boot time?
And more importantly, why is it all taking so long? In a world of 4-5 GHz CPU's that are thousands of times faster than they were, has hardware become thousands of times more complicated, to warrant the longer start time? Is this a symptom of a larger UEFI bloat problem? Now with memory characterization on some modern motherboards... how long do you have to wait to find out if your RAM is incompatible, or your system is dead on arrival?
Share your own experiences (and system specs) in the comments. How long is it taking you to choose a boot drive?
And what's your boot time?
As long as needed (Score:2)
My boot time is as long as my system needs it to be. I would guess it takes between 15 and 30 seconds, depending on memory retraining, verification, and my attention to it. Honestly I don't even notice as I'm still getting my desk ready, setting my coffee or water on the corner of my desk, and planning my work.
Booting from a USB drive to do offline backups or system maintenance can take longer than booting from an NVME drive, but in that case I'm watching for the "press any key to boot" message displayed
Re: (Score:2)
I think we can answer this as "5 seconds to 30 minutes". Its so subjective. Servers of course take a long time to process firmware and load disks and network and process all sorts of things - the faster the kernel gets the more crap we have to intiialize since hardware continues to grow in complexity. Then the actual kernel loading takes another minute if you have 200+ visible CPU available. Add in 8x Nvidia blackwells and you've added another half a minute. Have a SAS controller with dozens of spindle disk
Re: (Score:2)
Probably the best answer. You're right that it really depends.
My desktop? 10-15 seconds.
A Dell R-series server without boot memory test? Probably 1-2 minutes for iDRAC's hardware profiler to finish.
Some lightweight Debian VM I just spooled up for a project? I think the Grub menu timeout takes longer than the boot process.
Re: (Score:2)
My main PC was about 8 seconds when I did my last OS reinstall, however 12 months later it's 72 seconds now.
Re:As long as needed (Score:4)
I seem to recall that it was fast, though.
Re: (Score:2)
Back when DOS 5 was new I actually wrote some end user documentation that started:
1) Press the power button, the green light on the left of the computer should turn on. If it doesn't make sure your power strip is turned on.
2) Go down the hall to get a cup of coffee, this is going to take a while.
Re: (Score:2)
This thing was auto-launching some ugly terminal emulator to the AS400 in the Autoexec.bat, which took almost 5 minutes to connect and open. Until you got to the AS400 prompt it was unusable.
Re: (Score:2)
IIRC our AS400 took about 20-30 minutes from flicking the big red toggle switch until the console became usable.
But then it didn't happen very often, maybe once or twice a year.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: As long as needed (Score:2)
Wow, that click sound. Something I have not heard in a long, long time. I can still hear the "click, beep" in my head.
10 sec on a modern Laptop (Score:2)
Used to take several minutes in the nineties.
Re: (Score:3)
This. Followed by me wondering why we’re even asking this question. Are attention spans THAT spoiled?
You default to accusing someone of having attention problems rather than the far more likely outcome: there's a problem in the boot process that is causing it to take longer than normal. E.g. if you have RAM issues it very much can be the the UEFI process itself takes 10-20 seconds to successfully get the system up.
Re: (Score:2)
This. Followed by me wondering why we’re even asking this question. Are attention spans THAT spoiled?
You default to accusing someone of having attention problems rather than the far more likely outcome: there's a problem in the boot process that is causing it to take longer than normal. E.g. if you have RAM issues it very much can be the the UEFI process itself takes 10-20 seconds to successfully get the system up.
I’m not the only greybeard here wondering exactly why this question is being asked, since most *NIX heads here fully remember the boot burden of spinning rust, which upgrading that single component contributed to a massive savings in boot time.
And anyone who remembers the simplicity of BIOS knows that UEFI wears the bloat crown arrogantly and proudly. Besides, if you found RAM issues, you’ll waste far more than the (30 seconds * 365 days) of boot savings at the bank applying for the loan to buy
Re: (Score:2)
Yep, it is irksome wondering where the 10-20 seconds getting past UFI is going, but BIOS use to explicitly show a counter as it caused through RAM writing and reading various patterns, and you could skip it (ill-advised, but you could). Once you get past UFI modern boots seem to take tens of seconds, and in ye olden times the filesystem check on spinning rust was measured in minutes. If you couldn’t skip the check (at some point in the 1990s it became common for filesystems to note when they are in
Re: (Score:2)
I'm long retired and can still bore youngsters with tales of the IBM 1620 and punched cards. Now, I'm running a Dell Optiplex 980 that's at least a decade old and still uses spinning rust. It uses Fedora 43 and Xfce, and the timing on my last reboot look
Re: (Score:2)
Oh you're definitely not the only greybeard here who refuses to understand other people's perspective.
Comparing what we are discussing now to the days of yore is more a reflection of you not changing with the times. I didn't complain about boot time in the old days either because I specifically avoided booting my computer. That's not the case anymore, the power use of a PC is no longer outstripped by the lightbulb being on in the room. Many people turn their computers off when not in use and turn them on sp
Re: (Score:2)
Modern PCs, generally around 2010-2015 and newer, boot times stopped being a thing. Windows and Linux boot up to a state where you can login in basically seconds.
In the 90s and 2000s, it was a lot more painful because often times the slightest changes required a reboot. On Windows especially - change the IP address? Reboot. Plug in a new mouse? Reboot, etc. So you could be forced to reboot quite often and it took several minutes which was usually at the most inconvenient time. It was just an interruption in
Re: (Score:2)
I was employed at IBM from 1990 to 1991. One thing IBM did was provision their PCs with huge amounts of RAM for the times. I'd use a RAM drive to run things. Their standard PC was a 16 MHz 80386 with 16M of RAM. Yes, the 80486 had just been released, but even IBM struggled to keep up. I had an 80286 clone PC with 1M of RAM, fairly standard for the mid 1980s. They had some old 80286 PCs (genuine IBM brand PCs of course) they'd supplied with 12M, which they kept in use as network bridges. One big diffe
Re: (Score:2)
On Windows especially - change the IP address?
Baloney. Stopping and restarting network services was a 30 second process, 15 if you had to do it often and put it in a batch file. And plugging in a new mouse has rarely required a reboot since Win2K in my experience, just the patience to wait while the Plug-And-Pray service did its thing (serial mice being the rare exception).
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
My desktop has 64 GB of DDR5 RAM.
When I hit the power button, some motherboard lights and the fans turn on. And then nothing.
It takes a good minute for the RAM test to run. Nothing displays on the screen until it finishes. And that's the fast test. If the computer was unplugged before turning it on, it does a longer RAM test.
It takes long enough that I legit thought my parts were defective when I first built the PC. I tried turning it off and on and checking components a bunch of times. Finally I gave up an
Re: (Score:2)
It takes a good minute for the RAM test to run. Nothing displays on the screen until it finishes. And that's the fast test. If the computer was unplugged before turning it on, it does a longer RAM test.
It takes long enough that I legit thought my parts were defective when I first built the PC. I tried turning it off and on and checking components a bunch of times. Finally I gave up and assumed something was defective. Left it alone and started talking to my friend about what to do. We were shocked when it finally booted as we were talking.
So yeah, modern DDR5 based PCs take long enough to boot that a lot of people will assume it's broken before anything shows up on screen.
LOL this was me after getting everything pieced together. Push power button then literally nothing for minutes on end. Remember looking up the code on the mainboard and was just about to start pulling ram when the code finally changed and about a minute later it actually posted.
The crazy delays were mostly fixed in a later bios update.
Slow, then faster, then slow to ask for decryption (Score:2)
I remember noticing a huge speedup at some point, seemed like only 5-10 seconds to get the login prompt. This was 20(?) years ago when I was still building my own towers. Then something happened, I'll guess 10-15 years ago ... my next laptop took that long just to ask for the full disk decryption key. My latest laptop sometimes takes 30 seconds just to ask for the decryption key. No messages, nothing. After that, it's still only 5-10 seconds to get the login prompt.
Of course, this is all from memory, n
just as slow as 10 or 20 years ago. (Score:2)
My fedora workstation boots today in about the same time as it did 10 or even 20 years ago of in honest. UEFI is definitely not fast to get to the grub screen. But after that takes about 30 seconds to get to the login screen which isn't impressive IMO. Done of that is zfs importing and getting the root filesystem up.
Windows 11 boots in about half the time. Although I just worked on a laptop that windows 10 took about 5 minutes to boot and 10 minutes to get usable.
ZFS (Score:2)
My Gentoo install running in Qemu on Windows 11 takes about four seconds to boot from the time Qemu launches to sddm.
Re: (Score:2)
IIRC ZFS 2.4 will do parallel zpool imports, so that should help a bit, especially with a big server.
I think half my boot time on a big backup server is LSI device enumeration - which is totally not parallel - so there's only so much one can do.
Could the mptsas devs parallelize this task? It would certainly make lots of people happy.
It's also possible I could fiddle with systemd dependencies to get me a login shell before all the pools are imported because those pools aren't needed at all for the root file
Jellyfin (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I recently installed Jellyfin and it doesn't do nearly as well as Plex for identifying files. Some were hilariously wrong. Otherwise it works about the same.
Gotta love Linux (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Almost all of the userspace time is spent mounting a NFS share and NetworkManager-Wait-online.
unless you need the nfs mount to boot, there are boot flags to make it come up after boot and not during boot waiting on the network. _netdev and x-systemd.automount (for sysd systems) come to mind.
Threadripper, so long. (Score:4, Informative)
So, I believe that the majority of the pre-boot UEFI time is spent doing DDR training and PCIe training.
I've worked a bit on the RISC-V ecosystem. And while the CPU and motherboard are all open-source, there are two binary blobs left... the DDR training and the PCIe training. GigE and faster PHY might require training, too.
By training, I mean finding the speeds, offsets and parameters for these high speed and parallel links (even GigE is 4x 250 megabit). Much of this is highly proprietary and obviously hidden from normal view.
In the title, I say threadripper, so long (coincidentally, I just rebooted this vary machine I'm typing this on. The threadripper has PCIe training to do ... I believe with each card. There is also many memory modules of DDR.
I think the actual answer is 60 to 90 seconds.
But heck ... I've had servers that take over 5 minutes.
Re: (Score:3)
So, I believe that the majority of the pre-boot UEFI time is spent doing DDR training and PCIe training.
This is a process that is done once unless there is a hardware change. If it is happening every boot then something is wrong, typically either your PC never is actually booting with the memory settings you've setup (first boot failed and so it goes through training), or you've got some setting turned on that forces it to retrain on every boot.
Re: (Score:2)
But heck ... I've had servers that take over 5 minutes.
I imagine most of that was in the POST etc. - stuff that happens before the OS even starts to load.
I've got some rather old servers like that, they take for-bloody-ever.
Re: (Score:2)
Newer servers take longer than older servers. Its not x86 limited, a single tray in a GB300 NVL72 which is dual Grace takes ~8 minutes *just to POST*. The kernel only takes about 90 seconds. A storage server with multiple RAID cards could even take 10-15 minutes. More if you have multiple card with dozens or hundred+ drives.
It's the devices (Score:2)
It's not about how fast code runs, it's about how long it takes the (increasingly long) chain of mboard subdevices to be fired up and report back (including precoded "give it a moment to stop ringing" pauses). The total time is the total amount the engineers think they can take before a manager twists tighter.
Not bad (Score:3)
Bootup seems to be faster when you shut off all boot options except for the Windows bootloader. I shut off as much diagnostic, peripheral searching, and legacy boot stuff as possible.
Depends (Score:2)
>"How much time does it take to even begin booting, asks long-time Slashdot reader BrendaEM. Say you want separate Windows and Linux boot processes, and "You have Windows on one SSD/NVMe, and Linux on another. How long do you have to wait for a chance to choose a boot drive?"
I don't know, because all my machines have always been Linux only. My home Acer MB desktop with Ryzen takes about 6 seconds before it hits grub, then I am looking at a GUI login screen in about 5 more seconds. Of course, that machi
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think an average of 5 seconds is that long.
While the computing infrastructures are totally different, the time it took my 8-bit Tandy Color Computer 3 from the 80s to go from power up to usable was about 20-30 milliseconds.
My Linux desktops vary by how much time GRUB takes to launch the system (there's no need to include GRUB's wait time). After it launches Kubuntu, though, the time to a usable desktop is a small handful of seconds.
Re: (Score:2)
>"While the computing infrastructures are totally different, the time it took my 8-bit Tandy Color Computer 3 from the 80s to go from power up to usable was about 20-30 milliseconds."
AH, but not if you were loading/running OS-9 level 2 like I was :) Then it was a MUCH slower process. Totally worth it, of course.
6 seconds on my 2009 iMac (Score:2)
Not much progress since then.
Memory Characterization (Score:3, Interesting)
Memory Characterization is a process that is done once and stored. On successful boot UEFI should save all it needs to get the system booting up within a second or two. It sounds very much like this complaint is a symptom of something gone wrong. Possible things to look at:
1. Check to see if your UEFI has a setting like "full boot" or "fast boot" or anything similar that is set incorrectly. On my Gigabyte motherboard it's called UEFI FastBoot and if this is disabled the UEFI process takes about 10 before the system even has a chance to get to the OS.
2. Check your RAM speed. Is your RAM speed the same you set in the UEFI config screen? If not you're failing RAM characterisation.
3a. Possibly not doable: Do you have an 8 seg display on your motherboard showing the boot step? Seeing the same numbers flash repeatedly is an indication that the boot process is failing and that is often due to a RAM or or video card problem.
3b. Try setting your RAM speed to it's base level, disable all XMP/DOCP/EXPO settings. Does the boot process speed up? If so it's a symptom that the boot process is failing.
My Windows machine is at the login screen in under 10 seconds from pressing the power button.
My Linux machine doesn't feel appreciably slower to the point that I've cared about it so probably sub 20 seconds to the login screen.
I haven't dual booted in a while, but it's possible that fastboot may not work on a motherboard if need to select a different boot drive. The problem isn't that modern systems are slow, it's that they are so fast that the user isn't given time to interact with them (I find it very difficult to get into the UEFI screen as the time between keyboard being active and process being handed over to the bootloader is insanely short).
Not long, most time is spent waiting at boot menu. (Score:2)
But that's only every couple of months when it's time to reboot. Normal day is wake up from suspend to ram in 3 seconds ( actually it is less but it takes the monitor longer to wake and sync than for the desktop to wake up).
I had an old Tandy 1000HX with dos 3.11 (or was it 2.x) built into ROM. Boot time was about 2 seconds.
3 seconds? (Score:3)
I remember my Apple //c booting up in about five seconds, off a 5.25" floppy. I'll never forget the distinctive sound Apple DOS made when booting.
B-R-R-R-R-R-R-R.. chk-chk, chk, chhhhhhhhhk
(I used FaskDisk, which helped quite a bit with disk access speed by optimizing sector interleave)
Times were probably the worst on the Mac Classics, booting off their 2.5" discs could take 20-30 seconds before the desktop appeared, and another 20 seconds of really sluggish user interface while the rest of the bits loaded and launched in the background.
Nowadays a reboot can take about 20 seconds to get to the desktop and be responsive, though MOST of the time I reboot is due to an OS update, which can take 10 minutes to install and reboot a few times.
But how long does it take for your TV to boot? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
5-10 seconds in BIOS for me. (Score:2)
Most of the boot time on my machine(s) is spent turning on the MB hardware and getting it configured. Generally that takes between 5 and 10 seconds, with the Z790 machines being on the high end and the older Z470 being on the low end. Once Linux gets control most of the time is spent on USB devices. Not sure on the Windows boxen because they don't show that info.
boot ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Is that a Windows thing?
Both my Linux desktops from 10+ years ago and my Mac desktops these days rarely ever boot. Why would they?
I mean yes, it's an interesting question. But its relevance is minimal, isn't it? If you run both Win and Linux, you are probably running one of them in a VM on top of the other, because just the hassle - why would you do that to yourself?
Re: (Score:2)
I do use web appliances to connect to my server though. Although that technically forces an update/reboot cycle every once in a while, for some (no doubt silly) reason. I usually keep about 3 identical ones, open and ready to use, per room. So if one of them needs to update itself or recharge, I just swap it with another device. I find mosh is great for that pattern, I much prefer it to screen.
Re: (Score:2)
I run Linux too, and I never boot up. It cramps my uptime.
Never cared for uptime on my desktop machines. My servers, on the other hand... let's just say it's how I found out that the kernel counter is 32bit. :-)
Re: (Score:2)
Fun fact, I'm the only one who knows how to boot it when it's really off / powered down. Didn't realise, until my wife told me it wouldn't start anymore
Re: (Score:2)
My laotop triple-boots FreeBSD, Manjaro Linux, and OpenBSD.
I power it down most nights. I certainly never cared about uptime.
I don't use a boot menu; it boots FreeBSD by default. I press a function key when I want to choose another OS.
Using the stopwatch on my wristwatch just now, I measured 7 seconds from power on to the FreeBSD logo.
Re: (Score:2)
Both my Linux desktops from 10+ years ago and my Mac desktops these days rarely ever boot. Why would they?
Because some of us realise in 2026 one has to be a true piece of shit to waste power running a PC that isn't in active use, especially when they boot up in under 10 seconds.
Re: (Score:2)
In sleep mode, it draws next to no power. In fact, I would argue that starting it up might eat up more power than leaving it in sleep mode. (I'm talking a few hours, over night or so, not for weeks or months, of course)
Re: (Score:2)
While I agree with you I sadly find sleeping to be a bugfest even in 2026, even on Windows, to say nothing of Linux. Yeah it's probably a poor ACPI implementation or whatnot, but that doesn't matter. A clean state post boot is still a good thing, especially when your PC should boot about as fast as it can recover from sleep.
Sleep mode isn't perfect, but you do have a point with the power consumption. If you are booting your PC many times a day you may use a bit more power. But a lot of people underestimate
Re: (Score:2)
Nope, not a Windows thing. I never reboot my Windows desktops unless I'm updating the software.
Yeah, the bloat is real (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
My ZX Spectrum booted in the time it took to flash the screen (less than 1 second I'd say).
If you had the Interface 2 it could boot directly into a game (via ROM chips that overrode the memory bus to present their data), so even faster.
I'll make the same snarky comment as last time (Score:2)
Does it really matter much? Just how often are people powering down / rebooting their computers nowadays anyway?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I think the slowest machines we have, in terms of overall startup time, are some old Super Micro boxes. They're slower than the Dells (which aren't exactly speedy themselves).
However, nowadays day-to-day I find myself dealing with VMs a lot more often than with hardware servers - which is a definite improvement, in my book.
Re: (Score:2)
Why on earth are you doing this manually? Automate this a bit and you'll never care about this kind of thing again, and your job will be way more pleasant.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I get that. I just think, for the majority of users, that's not the situation. Although I suppose (to counter myself) one might also argue that users should be regularly powering their computers completely off anyway, whether it's for general security practice or for energy savings.
I'm pretty bad about doing that with any regularity, in any case.
Re: (Score:2)
Does it really matter much? Just how often are people powering down / rebooting their computers nowadays anyway?
Daily, maybe more than once. When the system boots in under 10 seconds (as it would when properly working) I have a better question: What kind of idiot would waste the power keeping it running?
Not the PC's fault (Score:2)
Most of my boot-up time these days is not spent by the PC but taken up my recently acquired Dell monitor getting confused by the screen resolution changes at startup. After BIOS's splash screen it goes grey, and then showing a message "No signal. Entering standby mode", thus obscuring the GRUB bootloader, delaying my view of it until it finds the signal again. ...
The monitor was supposed to be super fast, at 180 Hz, but
After I hit Return, I get to a Ubuntu Mate login prompt within 4 seconds.
More than half of boot process is waiting (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
For me: 20 seconds with training (32 GB) to boot menu, 12 seconds without. It's a Zen 1 (Asus Prime B350 Plus) platform.
Re: (Score:2)
Check your UEFI settings. If you've enabled fast boot, and your RAM actually passed its training at the settings you selected the previous time, they should just be saved and the entire process should be skipped. Long RAM training on most UEFIs is for RAM that is failing to train at the settings chosen, or for firmware that specifically are set to redo the training on every boot.
My computer boots so fast you can't reasonably input the key to get into the UEFI settings, you typically have to reboot to UEFI f
Usually 9am (Score:2)
Then I bring coffee to bed, and further hibernate for 30 minutes.
Linux is faster (Score:2)
12-15 secs (Score:2)
Running Slackware-current, using kernel 6.18.13. With a SSD, I'm seeing regular boot times of 12-15 secs, from GRUB2 to SDDM login screen. After supplying credentials, add perhaps 3 seconds more to a fully functional KDE Plasma 6.6 desktop.
It should be noted that Slackware is a systemd-free distribution which uses a simple BSD-like init system. I point out this because early on in systemd's development, one of the selling points was that "it would enable you to have faster boot times".
Re: (Score:2)
I just switched to FreeBSD 15.0 from RHEL 8.10.
Boot time is noticeably faster with FreeBSD.
perfection. (Score:2)
It Depends (Score:2)
Some desktop devices are 5- 8 seconds to POST and reach the initial boot point.
But, I've also got servers with fancy system controllers that can take 4 minutes to do hardware inventories and POST operations, before they start the actual booting.
12-15 seconds (Score:2)
Recently I was building an AMD-based PC system for a client. I started with 32 GB of DDR5 and there was some kind of systemic lag occurring while I was making changes in this PC's mobo UEFI BIOS settings. My USB mouse was lagging inexplicably. I eventually recalled that the usual A-B-A-B method for assigning dissimilar memory still applies. When I inserted my memory in the correct order everything seemed fine.
Undaunted, I got this system with its two SSD's each separately running Ubuntu Budgie and Windows 1
Court case about boot times (Score:2)
I don't know... (Score:2)
I don't actually know. My desktop runs Linux. I patch it a couple times a month perhaps, and grab a cup of coffee while it reboots.
But to the point of "Why hasn't it gotten faster", you have to understand what its doing. Servers have entire subsystems to inventory & boot, a modern Dell server has at least 3 OS'es (4 if you have an expander backplane) hiding under the hood before the one you see boots. So servers have a bit more stuff. But the fundamentals are the same for desktops & laptops. RA
28.273s including BIOS. (Score:3)
```
# systemd-analyze
Startup finished in 16.145s (firmware) + 1.093s (loader) + 860ms (kernel) + 6.285s (initrd) + 3.888s (userspace) = 28.273s
```
16 seconds in the BIOS, the rest actually doing things...
Re: (Score:2)
That's strange, my BIOS is done in a split second. By 16 seconds I already have a web browser open, it only takes 10 seconds to get to a login screen. Check your BIOS settings to see if fastboot is enabled or if your RAM timings in the BIOS actually match what the system booted into, it sounds like it's redoing training every single time.
6ms (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a personal project where I'm building clones of 8 bit computers (Apple II, Commodore 64 and such. There's even a YouTube channel [youtube.com]). It's an FPGA the gets loaded with a core containing a RiscV CPU (running a custom multitasking OS) and an 8 bit CPU running whatever the original computer did.
It takes about 40ms for the core to get loaded into the FPGA. From that point, it takes about 6ms until everything is initialized, the 32 bit OS gets loaded into memory, and the 8 bit computer gets put out of reset and begins its boot. The Apple II needs about 300ms to complete its startup routine, the vast majority of which is taken by issuing the "beep" it does when turned on.
The output is to an HDMI monitor. That takes around 3 seconds to sync on the image, which means that by the time any picture appears on screen, the computer has long finished boot. I'm seriously considering manually postponing the 8-bit startup just so the user has a chance to catch it happening.
Re: 6ms (Score:2)
That's awesome. I have been slowly collecting parts to build an MSX2. Probably Omega MSX. I'm not looking to reinvent the wheel, but more of a fun soldering and fabricating project for a platform that is familiar and enjoyable to me. (Coleco Adam and TI-99 back in the day, also did lots of Z80 on the TI-85/86. More recently a bit of retro coding for Master System and 8080/LR35902 on the Game Boy)
Re: (Score:2)
I can say without fear of ambiguity or modesty that I am very much after reinventing the wheel. In fact, I've lost count over the number of wheels I've reinvented thus far, and I don't think I'm done yet.
On my Windows 10 desktop... (Score:2)
...About 14 seconds from pressing the power button to the initial sign-on screen.
A tale of two computers (Score:2)
My current computer is a kick-ass Linux workstation with tons of RAM and a lot of attached peripherals with a CPU clock of 4GHz max. It takes about 20-30 seconds for the BIOS to be happy and then about another 15 seconds for Linux to boot to the graphical login screen, on Debian 13 with systemd and XFCE on X11.
My first computer was a TRS-80 Color Computer (original model) whose CPU ran at less than 1MHz. It booted into BASIC too quickly to measure. Certainly in less than half a second.
Re: A tale of two computers (Score:2)
My laptop boots Windows in several seconds. But Linux takes just under a minute. I still prefer Linux
work laptop (Score:2)
I never boot Windows (Score:2)
I just stay in Linux all of the time. Only reboot for software updates every few months. Not an issue.
Why would anyone want Windows?
Thank you all for responding (Score:2)
I don't know... (Score:2)
Really, I so rarely reboot, my daily drivers only reboot when an update requires it. I care more about wake from sleep time, which is usually under a second.
Reboot it's probably a few seconds mostly.
not a MIPS scaling (Score:2)
Booting isn't a problem that is a simple computation and it does not scale to instruction processing speed.
Add in that over the last 20 years, we have added many external engines with their own firmware necessary to initialize. And it should become apparent that much of boot up has the CPU idle.
Too long ago (Score:2)
Can't remember last time I booted any computer. For years been using suspend to ram rather than shutdown when not using my desktop. When I need access wakeup/WoL takes about 10 seconds to wake machine to the point I can login.
In the past had nothing but problems with hibernate/suspend to ram/wake on lan. It never worked right for me on anything but laptops.. now all works reliably even on server workstations.
FreeBSD 15.0 boots faster than RHEL 8.10 (Score:2)
I have not timed it.
But I have recently switched from RHEL 8.10 to FreeBSD 15.0, and the boot is noticeably faster.
5 minutes (Score:2)
That is if there's not too much dirt on the boots.
I never reboot (Score:2)
I run Windows for days or weeks between reboot, and then only for automatic updates, which I do while I'm not using the computer.
Boot time (Score:2)
Framework laptop.
Not long at all.
The restart/reboot is ridiculously fast.
Resume from suspend/hibernate is ridiculously fast.
The BIOS transferring to the bootloader? Seconds.
Honestly, it's like being in the year 2000 again. And my computer does what I say. Mostly because it's Linux.
Re:Thank 2 systemd (Score:4, Funny)
Looks like you're using the systemd spell check.
Re: Incomprehensible (Score:2)
Youâ(TM)re actually thinking about the question. Everybody else has given answers about total boot time to get to the point of using the system. This isnâ(TM)t what was being asked. TFA is about a dual boot system and how long it takes until they can choose which OS to boot. Itâ(TM)s asking about how long it takes to start booting the OS, not finish booting it.
Iâ(TM)ve got Macs, all of them dual boot. Thereâ(TM)s definitely a delay before the OS boots, but not normally annoying
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Back then we didn't have no fancy, shmancy, SSD.
And that's the way we liked it. We LOVED it.