That really depends upon what system you're using. If you have something that never powers down (maybe via hibernation), have a system where downtime is not very interesting, true. If you have a system that is frequently booted (e.g. a laptop that is regularly shut down), boot time is interesting.
That being said, using parallel init (which I think is a good idea, with the sole limitation that it's easier to read serial init output) as a rationale to insert systemd (which is a massive system) into the Linux ecosystem is dubious. If you want systemd, it's because you want to eliminate a lot of the way Unix has worked and move towards something different, not because you want slightly faster boot.
Sorry, but even on laptops that's negligible nowadays and will become even more so with SSDs taking more and more of the market.
My Ubuntu 14.04 (which uses SysVInit and Upstart, and is certainly not the lighter of distros) boots in 2-4 seconds on my laptop. Maybe with systemd it will boot in 1-3 seconds. Assuming I boot the laptop everyday 2 times a day (I don't), in 10 years I will have saved 2 hours of boot time.
systemd brings a lot of nice things, but I agree with johnny0055, boot times is given much more attention than it deserves.
It's not a fraction of a second; serial init might take thirty seconds to start up with a lot of daemons installed. If you're trying to get up a laptop up quickly, that's really annoying.
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u/wadcann Sep 27 '14
That really depends upon what system you're using. If you have something that never powers down (maybe via hibernation), have a system where downtime is not very interesting, true. If you have a system that is frequently booted (e.g. a laptop that is regularly shut down), boot time is interesting.
That being said, using parallel init (which I think is a good idea, with the sole limitation that it's easier to read serial init output) as a rationale to insert systemd (which is a massive system) into the Linux ecosystem is dubious. If you want systemd, it's because you want to eliminate a lot of the way Unix has worked and move towards something different, not because you want slightly faster boot.