[jeroenhd]

20 seconds in firmware, 8 in kernel, 6 seconds waiting for systemd networks to load, a second for Docker and an encrypted LUKS drive are most of my boot process (and a thousand tiny systemd services, of course).

I can disable a few things here and there, but whatever hardware detection takes place in the kernel (I assume Nvidia related things, it's always Nvidia it seems) isn't really somethint I can change. I can try disabling more POST parts, maybe, and disable Docker on boot to take off another second, but to shave everything down I'll probably need to reinstall.

[bee_rider]

Your original post (which, I assume, was just kind of an off the cuff guess, so I’m not trying to “gotcha” here), had us at around 25 seconds in kernel+user. So the goal of half that is around 12.5 seconds. And you measured 14 seconds. So it seems like it is in the right ballpark? I can save about a second by disabling NetworkManager… I’m sure there’d be some way to defer it, but it is not worth playing with it IMO.

Out of curiosity did you do some tuning or was the boot just faster than you guessed (if it is the latter, let’s all celebrate the fact that our computers have gotten fast enough to confuse us, haha! When XP actually came out I was a teenager with junky hand-me-down hardware, 45 second boots would have been a dream…).

[jeroenhd]

systemd-analyze plot gives me the following numbers:

Startup finished in 17.642s (firmware) + 9.467s (loader) + 20.168s (kernel) + 12.175s (userspace) = 59.453s graphical.target reached after 12.102s in userspace.

Subtract the slow motherboard firmware (17.642s) and me typing in my password (about 5s, nowhere close to the 9s+20s that the loader+kernel is taking to boot before systemd kicks in) and I get about 45 seconds of "this is what Linux and tools is actually doing before I can log in".

All Windows version from XP up to 7 were horrifically slow until modern SSDs came along. For years, you could take any Vista (or even XP) era computer, double or quadruple the RAM and insert an SSD, and it would feel like a completely new machine. You can still pick up a second hand high-end Windows 7 computer for cheap and use it for what you would otherwise spend $500-700 dollars on after ripping out the hard drive and installing an SSD.

Having used Windows 7 from a HDD for years, I can tell you for sure that Windows 7 sure didn't boot this fast when I first got it :)