Ask Lemmy

On some devices with Linux suspend can still consume a lot of power, I've had some pain with this in the past with Void but runit boots quick so non-issue.

I suppose another perspective is encryption, when the device Is powered off. It's going to be encrypted so there might be an extra degree of security there.

When I was performing dart analytics and teaching at the same time I would turn off my machine between classes just in case. But I still wanted it to boot fast because I'd have to then go and teach.

For a server, IDK.

I used to care on the desktop. AM5 boots painfully slowly, which probably would have been an issue at some point. Now I rarely reboot, so I don't care as much.

people will not reboot their workstations if it takes more than 2-3 minutes. becomes a pain when months of updates are pending and theyre bitching about having to reboot to fix their issues.

reboot workstations every 10 days or so people.

I used to care when it took a long time. But now that it's pretty fast I don't care.

It's one of those things that's not important untill it is. I seem to recall a kernel panic when launching software for a video interview, and in that moment... yeah... i felt every second of boot-up time.

There's diminishing returns. I don't think people care much as long as it's under a minute. Between 1-3 minutes they care a bit. 3-10 minutes and it becomes tedious. 10+ and people get very irritated.

If you've ever worked on a corporate system, that last category is very common no matter what the hardware is.

As for people bragging, that's all it is. They're saying it's so fast it can do [meaningless task] in an impressively short amount of time. Presumably, this translates into something more meaningful but harder to benchmark. For instance, they tell you it boots in 5 seconds because that means it can reopen all of their Chrome tabs in 30 seconds.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

it didn't matter to me until i got a PC which booted super 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.

Only if its abysmal.

I think they're just new boot goofin'.

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.

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.

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...

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.

For a server? Absolutely doesn't matter as long as it's not preposterous. Turning a server on can be done entirely linearly for almost every server and the slowdown is irrelevant.

For a desktop? Almost irrelevant, but it should be fast enough so you don't get bored enough to actually start doing something else.

Laptop? I actually like those to boot fast. I'm much more likely to pull one out to do something real quick, and so my laptop booting in a few seconds makes standing with my laptop on my arm to send a file real quick as I'm going somewhere feasible.

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

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'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.

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.

Working on Sun heavy iron, boot time was excuciating. We'd add RAM to a fully pupulated E3000 and then waiy 40 minutes before the first diagnostics appeared on the terminal.

That wasn't technically boot time, but the OBP equivalent of POST.

Honestly, OS boot time has never been an issue for me.

Whatever time I'd get by tuning my start-up would be dwarfed by the BIOS and grub startup dance. I only really reboot when I need to test a kernel.

I don't care about how long it takes to boot up, but I do care how long it takes from login to the desktop environment being usable.

Dealing with servers, I'm used to long boot up times since the low-level lifecycle management takes forever. But, once it's booted, I expect it to be ready to go. I have no patience for "Just a moment...." or "Getting things ready" after I enter my credentials. All that shit should have been taken care of during the boot up.

Thankfully, I mostly use Linux at home/work, so that's less of an issue, but it does make it all the worse when I have to remote into a Windows server.

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? ;)

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.

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

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.

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.

I don't really care, but I'm just a simple man.