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!