[jjoonathan]

re: bios settings, any keywords I should look for?

I've had MSI and Gigabyte motherboards, but the best I've been able to do has been to reduce from ~15 seconds to ~13 or so because the wait duration is just for the splash screen and chopping it to 0 just doesn't do all that much, the BIOS still dominates the startup time.

[Alupis]

Were you using UEFI mode, Fast Boot mode, and an NVMe drive? Boot times should only be a few seconds at most under similar configurations.

"Fast Boot" modes bypass hardware startup checks such as Memory, keyboard, etc. It also skips polling for keyboard input, which typically looks for the user pressing function keys to access boot menus, BIOS menus or other special startup procedures. Skipping polling alone can shave many seconds off boot times.

Just be aware, after enabling Fast Boot mode, you'll have to trigger a reboot into BIOS/UEFI from within your OS or by using a blessed utility provided by your MOBO manufacturer.

[rustqt6]

So I've mostly learnt from you but it's also possible I'm right here so I'd say- you can very well boot into firmware from bootloaders too. Systemd-boot has one default entry on my installation and I believer grub allows u too. Gonna actually go lookup grub because I need that entry

[sentientslug]

On my MSI board I think it’s called Fast Boot or Fast Startup. Also not sure of the wording but an option to skip splash screen.