> BIOS messages

I think the problem is right there. You’re living in the past so you get the past’s problem.

I haven’t seen a BIOS message in a decade.

I’m sure those U3011 are beautiful and hard to let go (I used to have a U27) but it’s also hard to look at a low-dpi screen once you’ve seen the light

Well, my machine is about a decade old. (Many upgrades along the way, though, and holds its own just fine)

BTW what's wrong with BIOS or UEFI messages? I much prefer them to cosmetic boot graphics.

Modern computers boot so fast that you can't really see those.

Sure. The fastest I've seen lately is that ARMv7-A board submitted the other day which boots in 0.37 seconds, or with networking, 2.2 seconds. That's time to user land, and to achieve it took highly specialized firmware and a stripped down kernel compiled with unusual options. I've yet to see a PC come anywhere close to that, and personally I won't consider the boot problem solved until a cold one completes quicker than I can turn on a lightbulb.

In fact historically, some of the higher-end hardware yielding the best performance during operation (an axis along which I optimize) actually added time to the boot sequence. The storage subsystem on my workstation is backed by a mix of four Intel enterprise-grade SSD's in RAID-0 (raw speed) and 8 big spinning platters in RAID-6 (capacity), plugged into an Areca 1882ix RAID card w/ 4GB dedicated BBU cache. Unfortunately that card adds a non-bypassable 30 seconds to the boot sequence, no matter what system you plug it into. But once there, it screams. It's only just the last couple years PCI-NVMe drives have come out that can match (or finally beat) the performance metrics I've been hitting for ages.

So I actually kind of feel like I've been living in the future, and the rest of the world just caught up ;-).