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It used to matter more, back when cold booting was way more common, and leaving your computer on was way less common, and people didn't have a computer in their pockets for most computer tasks.
Kinda like how boot time on smartphones used to matter because people had to restart them fairly frequently.
When there is a thing you want to do, and you have to wait for a a stupid machine to get ready before you can do it, it sucks.
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.
Yes, a single setting on the BIOS for AM5 changed my boot time from ~80 seconds to about 25 seconds which in turn greatly improved my life and cured my depression. I'd say its something worth thinking about if its unusually long
I like a properly fast boot time, but a couple of minutes is tolerable. Much more than that and it feels annoyingly slow.
What is truly annoying though is when I have to do something that should be quick but requires booting a computer on my work's network. I got back into the office once and literally had to wait 20 minutes when all I wanted to do was to print out one jolly document and go home - I guarantee you I cared about boot time that day...
how are you over 40 and you don't remember the boot times before SSDs?
its not that things didnt take a bit longer, its that i never cared between a minute or 5. ive never been a part of a conversation where a customer or coworker lamented boot times at all. it just never mattered. no one ever said 'gee how can we make this faster' or 'if only there were a product that booted faster we would prefer to buy that!'
even when i worked in 911/emergency services, it wasnt a thing that was ever discussed. i guess a lot of stuff had some redundancy/HA so end users werent really affected.
I expect my laptop to be fast so if it's boot time is 30 seconds, I'm now waiting 30 seconds. If I expected it to be longer I could go get a drink or something, but I'm expecting 5-10 seconds so any extra is fairly annoying.
I didn't buy an m.2 SSD to have HDD waiting times.
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.
I don't care that much on the desktop, though faster is always nice.
I do care on laptops, where it's linked to time required to wake up from hibernation.
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.
reboot workstations every 10 days or so people.
No.
Only reboot if needs-rebooting says so.
no, my clients are windows users. if something feels off, restart and see if it fixes it. there's so much shit happening in the background, something could have updated and either didn't or failed to restart a service, now something else doesn't work.
do you wait until your tires blow before replacing them? or preemptively when the tread is worn down too much?
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 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.
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 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:
ha, i do remember the days of the boot menu being too fast to catch what the keystroke is, or hit the keys fast enough to trigger the bios.. too fast!!
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.
Isn't your laptop use case the reason that sleep exists?
Isn’t your laptop use case the reason that sleep exists?
I don't want my laptop to have its battery constantly being drained.
I have it set up to suspend for 10 minutes, and if it's still suspended, hibernate.
That lets me move it from location to location quickly for short moves, but also means that if I don't open the thing up again for a week or two, it's fine.
Typically, yes. I have a tendency to use sleep when I'm coming back in some set period of time, and power off when I'm "going".
If I'm walking to a different room I'll close the lid and stick in under my arm which makes it sleep, or going to the bathroom or cooking dinner or something. If I'm leaving and sticking it in my bag, I tend to power it off.
It's a combination of not wanting the battery to die in sleep mode, and not wanting to put a heat generating device in my bag even if it's greatly reduced.
Thinking about it, powering down also drops the drive encryption keys from memory so it's arguably more secure. Not in the least why I do it that way, but it's an advantage now that I think about it.
Since I'm more likely to use the laptop like a super-phone, I appreciate it when it becomes usable fast regardless of what state I left it in.
Personally I'm not sure I really shut down my laptop. Only restart as required. But now I think about it, boot time is important for restarts!
True! I tend to power off if I use the software button, and suspend if I close the lid. I think it's the difference between "packing up" and pausing for a minute.
These production clusters I have at work are a nightmare to (re)boot. They run in a rather hostile environment, so sometimes we need to take it all down due to external factors. The rule of thumb is that it takes and hour to shut down and two hours to start.
There are 6 servers, and they have to start (and stop) in the correct order. Each takes around 10 minutes to boot, so if all is to be done correctly, it's roughly 40 minutes. The rest of the startup procedure is checking internal stuff as well as interfacing with various robotics and misc.
It's possible to gamble a bit, though: start 1, wait a bit and then start the next one, hoping that they come online in the correct order. But sometimes it doesn't and this gamble results in having to shut down everything and start over.
....If you follow procedure, that is. I know the system well enough that I can start all machines at the same time and just interrogate and sort out any misbehaving components, thus cutting down the startup time a lot.
So yeah, while the system takes a lot of time to start, it's mostly due to procedural reasons. In theory it could all be booted and ready in~15 minutes if we make the startup sequence more forgiving.
That's brutal. Is it clustered data storage of some sort? All the most offensive startup and shutdown sequence I've seen are giant storage systems.
You nailed it. Each server has 36 hard drives forming three RAIDs. These 18 RAIDs form a disaster-tolerant beegfs volume of 1.6PB.
On top of that, there's a bunch of highly specialized geophysical software, an oracle database, and misc mundane services.
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
