You can configure most Debian variants to boot in seconds from a decent SSD. Ubuntu Server edition was really pushing this for a while, the desktop editions don't seem to prioritise boot times quite so highly.

Hell, even Windows 10 boots from an SSD these days in less time than my BIOS takes to start the Windows boot process...

By introducing SSD into the equation, you're creating a false equivalency.

Sure, but it's a lot less disruptive solution to boot times than switching OS.

The thing is though, BeOS in 1999-2000 was booting in 5-10 seconds on (in my case) a 300MHz Pentium II with 64MB of RAM and a PATA/IDE spinning disk. Even a stripped down installation of Windows 98 took several times longer on the same machine. I lived in BeOS for over a year and a half on that machine, only booting Windows for a few games. It was pure heaven.

Desktop boot time mostly doesn't matter, it is an infrequent event -- once a day at most, if the system is shut down at night. Server boot time, on the other hand, does matter. You really don't want a server to be down for longer than it has to. Being able to reboot in 10 seconds is huge compared to rebooting in a couple minutes.

Now, given that servers are fundamentally running the same OS, improvements geared towards that market tend to bleed over to desktop as well. Desktop just has a bit more to bring up, with a graphical environment and everything.

If you've got "big" servers you can expect to spend minutes just checking RAM, and having the RAID controller identify disks & volumes.

Completely unrelated, but: thanks Steve, for debian-administration.org all those years ago!

Thank-you, reading that reply was a pleasant surprise!

AmigaOS can, and yes it's still being developed.