Comment by zamalek

> Except, that they are not

My experiences with NixOS show me that they are. What do I mean by that? I am forced (MSFT Intune) to use Ubuntu for work, and was using MacOS prior to that. Both took a good heft of time to boot up, especially compared to the WinNT example. They are general purpose and come with everything under the sun installed in-case the user needs it. In the latter case (MacOS) your hands are also pretty tied when it comes to slimming it down (to be clear, apps are easy to remove, but not system cruft).

The slowest parts of bootup on my personal PC (NixOS) are POST and the GRUB timeout. NixOS takes less time than either (< 2 seconds). I chalk that up to NixOS installing very little more than I tell it to.

I agree that WebApps make situation significantly worse, but the OS itself is full of garbage that does eat CPU cycles and IOPs.