Last time I ran it, Lakka (a Linux disto for Retroach emulation appliances) booted in 5s or less on an RPi2, to a usable graphical menu, complete with particle effects or whatever if you have that stuff enabled.

on a 1.44MB floppy?

Nah, but QNX could maybe do it still :-)

1.44 MB floppy read times might prevent sub-5-second boots to a GUI, though. I can’t really remember how fast things like that booted from a floppy, anymore.

It was even faster than that. I remember it being almost instantaneous. And you could even play Doom!

I’m pretty sure that 5s time 20 years ago was on a 1.44MB floppy, too. A real floppy! Not something emulated.

I used to have a setup where I'd boot the Linux-hosted version of AROS (so not nearly the same as booting from scratch certainly) straight into FrexxEd, and it started AROS + FrexxEd faster than my Emacs install started on the same box...

> You can see here a recent AROS booting in 3s (it is not clear if it is bare metal though):

The virtualbox window is pretty clear to me :D

Youngsters, bragging about their good eyes... ;)

Anyway: I thought I have here a laptop I have to initialize, maybe I will install IcarOS on it as soon as I will have the time. So, we will see how it behaves on bare metal.

Or just having overly-large screens. Or just going back to the video after reading the comment :p

IcarOS seems like a fun thing to play with. Don't go too deep in the obscure OS rabbithole, it's indefinitely deep.