Is there any particular reason why Windows users are so obsessed with boot time? I usually leave the computer on all the time or use suspend-to-RAM, which makes boot time irrelevant.
My $600 ASUS S400CA Laptop usually boots in 10 or 15 seconds, cold boot, no SSD on it or SSD cache. That's why I have an SSD on my PC Well I think it's okay to find amusing an OS that revived my 2007 moms PC and made it boot in 25 seconds <3 And I quite love the use of Segoe on the Ui, that lowercase 'a' is sexy
Same here. I only shut down once in a while like leaving town. Probably people that restart their computers 20 times a day. Once or twice every couple days is enough if you're having issues with Windows regularly due to faulty drivers or programs (which should be upgraded to a newer version if it's happening too much), otherwise you never need to, except for those Windows updates. I just have the monitor go to standby after 30 minutes and leave the rest of the workstation running constantly. Shut off the speakers at night or when using headphones.
The only usecase I can think of (speaking as someone who also runs his PC 24/7) is laptop users who are constantly carrying their machine around, possibly away from sockets for hours at a time, and who don't want a laptop cooking its own guts in a rucksack.
Long boot times are also commonly indicative of a whole bunch of unnecessary shit running. Whenever I go troubleshoot for someone, if they turn on their machine and it takes more than 30secs to get to the login screen I'm all NOTTU DISU SHITO AGEN
And energy saving? My PC is usually turned on about 12h everyday. It costs about R$50 with the local kW/h price. Our minimum salary is about R$700, so it's roughly 1/14 of our minimum wage. 1/14 of the US minimum wave is $85 so it's not something to ignore.
Suspend-to-RAM / Suspend-to-Disk is still an option. The latter is effectively the same as powered off, but it saves everything in RAM to the HDD / SSD, so on next boot everything's exactly the same as it was when the system was suspended.
Windows 8 might be (very) slightly more efficient than Win7, it does indeed make gaming a pain sometimes. The OpenGL stack is problematic in Win8 in many aspects, even with up-to-date GPU drivers (also IIRC the drivers provided in WinUpdates never offer OpenGL, you definitely have to install from your card's manufacturer). Legacy Radeon cards are broken on 64-bit Win8, and Intel GMA + Intel HD4000 seems to suffer from issues too. I'm not too sure what the problem is, but it is notable that Microsoft kinda wants to get rid of OpenGL since Vista.
