Ask Lemmy

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 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

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...

I don’t remember the last time I rebooted by laptop. Of course it doesn’t run Windows either.

It shouldn't feel forever. I like that the longest part of booting my PC is the grub selection for my dual boot setup. I have an older laptop that takes about 2 minutes to boot. Not a deal breaker, but a noticeable delay.

I don't really care.

But it being snappy sure feels good. On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 feature making the setup unattractive, 5 being indifference, 10 being super important, booting fast is a 6.

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.

It's a nice thing, but not a metric that I'm gonna brag about.

The only times I cared about boot times was:

1. When BIOS/UEFI goes by too fast and I can't hit the boot menu key fast enough.
2. When I got my current computer back in 2022, I went from booting from HDD, to NVMe SSD over PCI-E 4.

I care about not having slow boot time, but I don't really care if it's fast.

Well, (potential) customers do care about quite a few completely useless metrics, or ta least meaningless ones. Exactly like they do with their photography gear. Marketing departments need those things to sell new device, right? ;)