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?
Its very important in embedded applications. Think of kiosks or other customer facing software. The longer it takes to boot the longer its out of service before the reboot finishes. It is essentially the upper bound of recovery time after an error.
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’m not sure if you’re including consumers in this. I have a gaming PC. When I get a message that friends are looking for a game, I want it to be on immediately so I can play.
Am I willing to do something about that? Like get a better drive, finally upgrade to UEFI, etc? No. But I want fast.
this is fairly true… ive not been exposed to end users not in some corp or organization environment…
I find it rather amusing that big servers are optimized to never fail with redundant pdus and fans and the like but as soon as you have to restart such a device, prepare for 10-20 minute downtime.
My take is: before we had ssds so that a shitty configured windows pc could take up to 5-10 mins to boot, that really was a problem. Nowadays, especially were many devices use suspend instead of shutdown and are much faster, not any more.
On the other hand, my fucking smart tv takes 2 minutes to boot and i hate it.
My TV does this thing where for 3 seconds after you press power, it will let you cycle through the inputs (but you can’t see anything because the screen is still off). Then it prevents you from doing anything with a message “powering on” for like 10 seconds. Then the input button opens a menu that lets you choose inputs.
So when I turn it on, I mash the input button trying to change it to the thing I want before it starts “powering on.” So annoying.
I care about not having slow boot time, but I don’t really care if it’s fast.
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.
I guess I do. I put the computer (a desktop) into suspend most nights so that it’s pretty much up and running as soon as I turn it on the next day.
Even so, rebooting doesn’t take that long. 30 seconds tops. Definitely not enough time to visit the bathroom or make a hot drink.
But the advantages to suspend are that it’s quick and all my programs are as I left them. A reboot undoes most of that.
Yes, hibernating is also an option to keep open programs, but why do that when it can be quicker?
My only real concern with putting the machine into suspend is if there’s a power cut and things end up in a weird state or I lose work because programs weren’t closed properly, but then, that could happen at any point when I’m using it too.
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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.
For a general purpose work machine, no. Even for a gaming desktop, probably not. For a gaming laptop, maybe, depending on your lifestyle.
For a gaming handheld? Yeah, definitely. You want a good battery-saving sleep mode, and a quick shutdown/startup as well.
The other scenario I can see is field work machines, for kiosks or task logging, especially if you need to change sites on a regular basis.
My windows partition takes upwards of 2 minutes to actually be ready to do anything, my Linux partition is ready to rock ten seconds after I push the power button and four of those seconds are intentional delay to choose a boot disc.
I didn’t care about it before, but I sure do now. Booting into windows these days is torturous in comparison.
I don’t remember the last time I rebooted by laptop. Of course it doesn’t run Windows either.
