There are a number of issues affecting boot speed. Size of code and number of files all reflect bloat. Another biggy is that the OS needs to load many files and most PCs have a single hard drive making it the bottleneck. On machines where speed of booting matters, I put multiple hard drives in RAID 1 and boot times improve dramatically. This is accelerated further with “dependency based booting”, that is the order in which files are loaded may be determined by dependencies and starting several processes to load things with different chains of dependencies really helps. I have seen virtual machines with dependency-based booting work in under 4s.

After you have reduced bottlenecks to a minimum there is still another method of speeding booting/loading of apps, terminal servers. Have a big powerful machine idling with all the needed files in cache/RAM. A login on that machine will be 5X faster than a cold machine. Then connect thin clients with a minimal system and dependency-based booting and you have the optimal performance. I have used GNU/Linux terminal servers and thin clients in classrooms for years. When students get used to 2-5s logins to a working desktop and sub-2s loading of browser or word-processor, they feel pain when faced with the usual desktop with single hard drive.

My terminal servers are using fast hard drives 500gB+ or SCSI and lots of RAM with a gigabit/s network interface to the clients. I can do this magic even with an 8 year old PC and beat the pants off a new PC. I would love to use SSD but so far the price/performance isn’t where it needs to be.

Just think.
Most of our usb drives come with FAT32 by default. That is NOT a great filesystem in general, though when used on flash memory it will perform better than on an ATA drive.
NTFS has been going strong for 10+ years with little improvement. Wonder why 7 takes as long to boot as XP?

With the advent of ext4 for Linux/BSD-based OS’s, things have gotten much faster. 10 second boot times? Been done. Instant On? Also done. Running a server? You have Reiser, JFS and XFS if you don’t like EXT’s, or BTFS if you’re adventerous.

Oh, and have you perhaps tried running on RAID? Raptors with 15000 rpm?
Disk encryption will slow down boot times as well, there are many factors involved.
A lot of older laptops used 4200rpm 2.5′ disks. Now we have 7200.

That’s also forgetting functionality and OS bloat.
Obviously this man has never used DSL or Puppy Linux on a cdrom, the slower readable medium.

It is not just operating speed that changes but they introduce new interfaces or protocols that need new dedicated hardware to operate at speed. When they have a choice to modify an existing platform to enhance performance in a backward compatible way, they are just as likely to introduce a completely new way to connect it to a computer so that you have to replace your whole system just to use the new tech.

What I do not understand is why Gnome 3 needs accelerated graphics except for a little polish on the look and feel. The underlying organization and operation certainly do not look that demanding. I know that they need it to look sparkly to shiny and new to compete with the proprietary offerings. It does nothing for people who are more utilitarian like me.

I have a Windows 7 machine that I power up once every couple of months when there is some dreary need. I have all of the “special” graphics features turned off that I can. They do nothing but waste my time.