ive been using/managing/fixing computers and servers for 40+ years. from old AS400 to full on cloud bullshit. i can remember only a single time where boot time mattered… when microsofts DNS failures caused servers to take 15 minutes to boot… other than that there hasnt been a single time it has ever been a problem or discussed as an issue to be resolved.
so why the fuck is it constantly touted as some benefit!? it grinds my gears when i see anyone stating how fast their machine booted.
am i alone in this?
I don’t really care, but I’m just a simple man.
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 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.
My TV does this thing where for 3 seconds after you press power, it will let you cycle through the inputs (but you can’t see anything because the screen is still off). Then it prevents you from doing anything with a message “powering on” for like 10 seconds. Then the input button opens a menu that lets you choose inputs.
So when I turn it on, I mash the input button trying to change it to the thing I want before it starts “powering on.” So annoying.
It’s a nice thing, but not a metric that I’m gonna brag about.
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.
