ive been using/managing/fixing computers and servers for 40+ years. from old AS400 to full on cloud bullshit. i can remember only a single time where boot time mattered… when microsofts DNS failures caused servers to take 15 minutes to boot… other than that there hasnt been a single time it has ever been a problem or discussed as an issue to be resolved.
so why the fuck is it constantly touted as some benefit!? it grinds my gears when i see anyone stating how fast their machine booted.
am i alone in this?
It didn’t matter to me until I had a laptop that booted super fast. And now it matters…
When my desktop took a bunch of minutes to boot I put ff and compilers etc in the auto-launch-at-boot which made it take even longer but started the PC before I got breakfast. Everything up and ready when I got back.
Then I got an SSD.
Now I’m on linux so I rarely switch the PC off at all…
For some reason my PC recently started taking ages just to get to the UEFI logos.
So far it hasn’t bothered me enough to figure out why though.
When it takes long yeah. Generally with a ssd boot times are pretty fast across the board but it also makes me expect a fast boot time. I expect a system to boot so fast now that there is little to no wait to the point powering up is not noticably slower than coming out of sleep. I get rather annoyed now if the os does not go by as fast as the bios screen. If a minute passes from pressing the button im like wtf. Again though I find most things can boot that fast now and its sorta unusual when they don’t. One thing I have been loving about not being on windows is I don’t seem to have to worry about various things getting put into start up automatically which would ruin my boot time on windows.
it didn’t matter to me until i got a PC which booted super fast
I think they’re just new boot goofin’.
When computers took minutes to boot, it was annoying. In the days before computers had a suspend feature, you might be turning a computer on and off multiple times a day, and you would just have to wait a while before you could do anything. In the days of windows 95 and some of the subsequent releases, you would just expect to get the blue screen of death constantly, and keep having to reboot. Install something and have to reboot. Waiting on rebooting added up to quite a chunk of time.
These days, I reboot my pc once a week or less, and then it’s back up within a minute. So yeah, it doesn’t even bother me now because it’s such a non-issue. But that’s just because of all the progress that has been made in that area over the decades.
For large scale compute clusters with elastic load I absolutely care. The difference between one and five minutes of boot time when I ask for a hundred new instances to be provisioned is huge in terms of responsiveness to customer requests.
- nothing will take 5 minutes.
- build a queue of clean, suspended VMs if you need them that fast
I run massive, global kubernetes clusters in AWS for a company you’ve probably heard of. There is no queue of clean VMs–not like you’re thinking anyway. And provisioning a new node can take Too Long under not-all-that-uncommon scenarios.
The next best option is overprovisioning the cluster, but even 1% overhead has big costs at this scale.
I care about not having slow boot time, but I don’t really care if it’s fast.
I remember the days before fast boot, you’d sit there like it was punishment, while it counted ram, then if you hit a snag, you’re in for the big hurt
I know it was quite popular to measure boot times when SSDs were first coming out because of the massive speed difference there was from HDDs. I think its just a fun/easy metric to measure and report on today. Most probably don’t care if its 10 or 20 seconds.
in the 80s/early 90s we used a directory listing to demonstrate how fast the machine was… when the pentiums started to hit, it finally listed faster than you could read.
I use QubesOS and dom0 boot takes a while (haven’t been bothered to figure out why it waits till sys-whatever starts before dropping me into the login screen). The boot times for the VMs once the main boot is done matters cos that’s how long launching a program takes but that’s usually pretty quick.
Server: Not really as long as it’s only a few minutes. Sure it was annoying to configure it the first time because windows wanted to reboot after installing the drivers for the usb stick and whatnot, but I’m paid by the hour regardless.
Desktop: I’ll turn it on and go get coffee. If it’s on by the time I get back it’s okay.
Laptop: I’m currently standing next to some industrial machine trying to fix it, if it’s not incredibly hot or loud it smells awful. The time it takes from pressing the power button to getting to debugging is really high on my priority list.
Boot time isn’t as important to me as the time it takes to be ready for use. I notice this more on Windows machines where it gets to the desktop and it’s still fucking around with a bunch of stuff in the background for a minute or two.
oh yeah, fuck this shit, windows 11 is trash with this. hate rebooting my work laptop for this reason.
i used to care (about the long updates). then i realized they are paying me to wait for the garbage they force me to utilize. whatevs
I remember on my old XP machine I had to wait for the last taskbar icon to load before I knew it’d respond well. Super annoying.
I don’t remember the last time I rebooted by laptop. Of course it doesn’t run Windows either.
