I did a fresh install of fedora in a VM given 4 cores, 16gb ram, and storage on an NVME SSD. Finally I am getting a reasonable boot time of 6.5 seconds. But on bare metal I can't get anywhere close to that. Firmware alone takes 15 seconds. Either way, now I know that it isn't a "Systemd problem", just that only Systemd gives me this problem.
Idk what is wrong but every fresh install on any Systemd distro (Arch, Fedora, Debian, openSUSE) has the same slow boot on every device I have tried. I have never seen a 5 second boot on anything else but dinit.
Oh, and my disk is a modern M.2 SSD for my workstation.
I have tried. Nothing worked. I also experience the same slow booting on every machine+systemd, with the same resulting slow boot up. Even friends have mentioned to me the slow boot times compared to Windows.
The big reason I personally dislike Systemd is bloat. It takes me 6 seconds to boot a windows 11 VM, it takes 20+ with Systemd, and it takes 6 seconds with dinit. On real machines I frequently hit 40 seconds with systemd. Now is that enough of a problem that I am going to switch to Windows (ugh) or Chimera/Artix, probably no. I still find it very annoying.
Plus packages are manually inspected to ensure they meet Flathubs packaging requirements.
Legit goals
Appimages use the deprecated fuse2 dependency, never integrate well on the system, and run unsandboxed. I personally hate them.
openSUSE Slowroll and Secureblue are my favorites ATM. Slowroll for gaming, Secureblue for mobile device. Both are hardened for security because that matters to me.
Storms
Source is MF DOOM on the track All Outta Ale
Very cool, love Incus. Wish it had better security options, such as supporting GVisor application kernel.