Which Linux Distribution Boots The Fastest? An 11-Way Linux Comparison

[flux242]

boot time is important for embedded platforms and doesn't really make sense for a desktop. Mine boots in 8 seconds and I wouldn't mind if it would boot in 20 because I only suspend my notebook and never switch it off. But such measuring makes some people busy, what else would they do instead, huh

[speculatrix]

Can you try an entirely in-memory distro like Slitaz?

[andre30correia]

Systemd testes for what? No one cares about that. My Ubuntu 17.10 boots in 2 sec (a great ssd ofc) makes some difference for me if it boots in only 1?

[haagch]

On my Arch with an nvme PCIe SSD from ebay:

$ systemd-analyze
Startup finished in 19.618s (firmware) + 4.559s (loader) + 2.359s (kernel) + 2.516s (userspace) = 29.053s

with the longest userspace time spent mounting filesystems from the spinning hard disk.
loader includes grub, right? That's a 4 second countdown for me.

So all in all, thanks a lot Asus, for taking almost 20 seconds before your Prime B350-Plus board starts my bootloader!

[CrystalGamma]

On my Arch with an nvme PCIe SSD from ebay:

$ systemd-analyze
Startup finished in 19.618s (firmware) + 4.559s (loader) + 2.359s (kernel) + 2.516s (userspace) = 29.053s

What package is that program in? It's not available on my system as it is, and there aren't any packages that sound like it would be in there …

[caligula]

boot time is important for embedded platforms and doesn't really make sense for a desktop. Mine boots in 8 seconds and I wouldn't mind if it would boot in 20 because I only suspend my notebook and never switch it off. But such measuring makes some people busy, what else would they do instead, huh

Perhaps 60 or 120 seconds would be even better for you? Or 5 minutes? If you don't care about boot speed, let's enforce extremely slow boot on everyone! Just because really fast boot time makes you angry. I'm sure it would benefit everyone, including embedded folks, if the default settings would be as slow as possible so that they could speed it up only with insanely amounts of increasing work and more diffs against mainline. Yea, let's do that.

[Vistaus]

This might give some idea: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Sof...aderInterface/

Again, I'd say this test is yet again totally wrong and misleading. The firmware + loader time isn't distro specific. Of course you get shitty boot time if the boot loader menu stays active for 10 seconds on distro X and 1 seconds on distro Y. Also if the UEFI spends time training RAM modules on one occasion and got fixed the next day, the first tested distro would get bad results. I'm really disappointed with this.

Solus shows GRUB for quite a few seconds, yet it's among the fastest in all results (I can also vouch for that personally). So boot loader time isn't the problem here.

[Vistaus]

Basically you can optimize the kernel config that you don't need an initrd and boot straight via EFI without GRUB. This way you can gain 5 seconds. Maybe some distros already use systemd-boot - formerly known as gummiboot which is pretty fast too. New Ubuntu runs GDM and not lightdm, might be slower too. Basically the DE should be the same for all tests otherwise you compare apples with oranges.

GDM is slower indeed.

Also, if the DE should be the same out-of-the-box, then Clear Linux needs to be expelled next time 'cause technically it doesn't have any DE by default.

[Vistaus]

boot time is important for embedded platforms and doesn't really make sense for a desktop. Mine boots in 8 seconds and I wouldn't mind if it would boot in 20 because I only suspend my notebook and never switch it off. But such measuring makes some people busy, what else would they do instead, huh

I suspend my laptop most of the time, but I need to reboot for kernel updates so I do like a fast boot, but 8 vs 15 is okay.

[Vistaus]

Can you try an entirely in-memory distro like Slitaz?

Better yet: an 11-way in-memory distro comparison
Slitaz, Puppy Linux, Knoppix, etc.