And I still can't boot my Linux system in a reasonable time. Perhaps the true problem that needs to be solved is that everybody is somehow (forced at) reinventing the wheel every time.
The real problem is linux is just a kernel - they cannot force you to have good hardware. If you want fast boot you need to start with the hardware: a lot of hardware has an long init sequence so there is no way the kernel can boot fast as it cannot boot until that hardware is initialized. Then you can look at the kernel, step one is strip out all the drivers for that slow to init hardware you don't have (since those drivers have to insert waits into the boot while they check for the hardware you don't have). If you do this you can save a lot of boot time.
Of course in the real world the people who select your hardware don't talk to the people who care about software. So you are stuck with slow boots just because it is too late to go back and do a fill million dollars each board re-spins now that we know our boot times are too slow.
It gets worse, even if you select fast init hardware that doesn't mean it really is fast. I've seen hardware that claims to not need long inits, but if you don't insert waits in the boot there are bugs.
I haven't kept up with modern linux - is there a tool that automates that?
e.g, records what drivers have been used over some number of boots, and then offers to disable all the drivers that haven't been used.
I don't think this is related to slow hardware, maybe bad drivers, but not slow hardware.
I consistently get a faster boot both on Windows and on MacOS with reasonably slower specs than my Linux desktop.
The linux boot is fast, some 5sec maximum. But Windows is almost instant, of course it uses the notorious fast startup, but even so I expected more from linux, being some lightweight as it is
At least on my completely unoptimized desktop, majority of boot time is already spent in UEFI firmware, not in kernel or userspace startup. So realistically there is limited opportunity to optimize the boot times.
