Fast startup as an option in KDE plasma that is opt in for people mainly coming from windows who want fast “boot” times.
It would work by closing all apps then hibernating the system. In windows this is disguised as a shutdown
It could reduce friction from users looking to transition from windows who find that Linux takes “too long to boot”
So I just created an account and got here and the first post/comment I see is literally just someone being full on toxic on a perfectly valid and fair feature suggestion. Why ?
I have a really old machine here and Manjaro KDE boots in like 5 seconds. That’s not even enough time to get my old fart brain to spit out my password.
hibernation is not universally supported by motherboard firmware so it makes more sense to just offer suspend to ram which is more widely supported.
i would like to have my machine hibernate after some time but i’m going thru a devil of a time trying to get kubuntu 24.10 to offer me the option (it used to on my old machine using 22.04 and that machine didn’t support sleep, only hibernation.)
i think the therm “fast boot” is triggering since it’s not one of the official states recognized by most hardware and software makers, but rather a windows specific term to gloss over what they are actually doing and that is some bastardization of the normal suspend / resume feature set.
I imagine a better solution would be to optimize the boot process so that Linux can boot in under 5 seconds but that would be distro dependent, maybe KDE Linux could do it?
You might be interested in a few features from systemd like:
systemctl soft-reboot (reboot while keeping the kernel loaded)systemctl hybrid-sleep (suspend while keeping the current state stored in the disk)In addition to the traditional sleep and hibernation. I don’t think there’s something like fast startup which closes everything, logs you out, and then hibernates.
These sorts of features actually come from systemd, so KDE can’t do anything about the behavior, but it should be possible to have GUI settings to default to the reboot/shutdown mode you want.
Linux doesn’t really need that imo. I’d say most distros boot up pretty fast out of the box. The arch wiki offers some tips and tricks to make it faster if it’s slow or to take it even further when it’s already fast:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Improving_performance/Boot_process
On my machine as soon as my drive is decrypted I get the plasma startup animation.
My Linux starts faster than windows 10-11 on the same hardware. Most of startup time is actually UEFI initialisation (motherboard vendors really need to fix it, as it takes 8-14 seconds, usually around 8 seconds), then it is 2 seconds of kernel start, another 2 for luks decryption, and around two seconds to start KDE Plasma from terminal. I really think on Linux and KDE side almost everything possible was already done.