It was said to boot in 5s twenty years ago...

The hardware compatibility list shows a promising number of machines ( http://www.menuetos.net/hwc.txt ). If you have a spare one, you could try and report. There is a chance that you will achieve a very fast boot time.

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AROS (Amiga) could reboot in ~7s, ~15yrs ago. And you can do more than you can with MenuetOS. Again, today you will probably break that record.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yNIuNnBrWg

Edit:

You can see here a recent AROS booting in 3s (it is not clear if it is bare metal though):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_s_TfmF-_iE

It was even faster than that. I remember it being almost instantaneous. And you could even play Doom!

Last time I ran it, Lakka (a Linux disto for Retroach emulation appliances) booted in 5s or less on an RPi2, to a usable graphical menu, complete with particle effects or whatever if you have that stuff enabled.

on a 1.44MB floppy?

Nah, but QNX could maybe do it still :-)

1.44 MB floppy read times might prevent sub-5-second boots to a GUI, though. I can’t really remember how fast things like that booted from a floppy, anymore.

I’m pretty sure that 5s time 20 years ago was on a 1.44MB floppy, too. A real floppy! Not something emulated.

> You can see here a recent AROS booting in 3s (it is not clear if it is bare metal though):

The virtualbox window is pretty clear to me :D

Youngsters, bragging about their good eyes... ;)

Anyway: I thought I have here a laptop I have to initialize, maybe I will install IcarOS on it as soon as I will have the time. So, we will see how it behaves on bare metal.

Or just having overly-large screens. Or just going back to the video after reading the comment :p

IcarOS seems like a fun thing to play with. Don't go too deep in the obscure OS rabbithole, it's indefinitely deep.

I used to have a setup where I'd boot the Linux-hosted version of AROS (so not nearly the same as booting from scratch certainly) straight into FrexxEd, and it started AROS + FrexxEd faster than my Emacs install started on the same box...

Faster than you can say "what are boot times like" from what I remember.

But it's not a practically usable OS, it's more like a study in how far you can get with pure assembly. Though if a text editor is really all you want, it might be good enough.

Might be pretty close to enough with a good ssh client and terminal. It’s probably actually real time which is neat for FOSS.

It was also how far you can go running an entire OS from a diskette. And it was really impressive.

CP/M with Wordstar plus dbase all on one 180kB floppy

I don't know if much innovation is really required, honestly. You probably won't find what you're looking for with Mac/Windows, but if you run a tiling window manager like i3 on Linux you'll pretty much just see a clock, some system stats, and whatever applications you have open on the screen. You can pretty easily configure the bottom bar to remove the superfluous system stats, or even the clock if you want.

Is that the kind of experience you'd look for in a distraction-free OS? If not I'd be interested to hear your ideas - I use i3 for work but manage to distract myself anyway because I always have a web browser open.

I'm running XMonad on Linux, and I don't see any clock or system stats, because I don't run that. No bottom (nor top etc) bar for me.

(You can add such bars in XMonad, just like you can remove them from i3.)

If you truly want focused you don't even need a window manager, you aren't even forced to run x11 or wayland but if so just put your favorite text editor desktop file in /usr/share/xsessions is enough.

If you really, really want focused you can just drop everything and replace init with your editor http://informatimago.free.fr/i/linux/emacs-on-user-mode-linu...

Yes however I don't think you would have the network in that case[1], which might be handy to automatise backups.

[1] unless you start it from emacs which is also totally possible

you'll be distracted by your eternally changing .emacs configuration file :-)

Would be a good application of a Grub menu option:

a) Boot with all bells & whistles. Or b) Boot straight into editor & type away.

Hell you could even use a customized kernel for that, to strip out all the boot-time consuming features that editor doesn't need.

On any recent PC, I find that more than half the time booting Linux to a GUI is in POST.

[edit]

And 5 seconds for DHCP if you are using dhcp

When I used it (and Kolibri, Floppix, and QNXdemo) in the mid-2000s it was mostly down to the speed of the floppy drive. So about the same as loading Windows 10 from a conventional (spinning rust) hard drive.

You don't need a new OS for that. You can do that as a Linux distribution just fine.

Maybe with heavy hacking, but not ready-made, at least that I’ve found. Certainly don’t seem to be any distros (in the casual searching I do periodically) that focus on 1-second boot times out of the box.

You might like https://www.benjamin-schieder.de/nethacklinux.html

Replace nethack with your favourite editor, and it might just work. (Well, also replace the floppy disk with something faster.)

Faster than the BIOS. Under a second

Haven't tested recently, but FreeDOS (or SvarDOS) boots in a couple of seconds. The kernel is ridiculously minimal. From there, you could launch a text editor via autoexec.bat and voila. It is a fun system, too.

Years ago, I found a bootable USB project on Github with a tiny custom Linux kernel that only launched vi. IIRC, my computer's fan was always running full speed with it, though.