Slower startup in 24.04 - don't understand 'systemd-analyze critical-chain'

[Liam Proven]

On Mon, 7 Oct 2024 at 17:02, Peter Flynn <peter at silmaril.ie> wrote:

> The addition of a progress bar, or some phrases describing what it is doing, would be a major contribution towards new user acceptance.

You're right, but it is hard to do.

Early graphical bootloaders did it, but sadly about 15Y ago a trend
for "fake", pretend progress bars where the line does not fill in but
merely cycles round -- so it looks like a progress bar, but actually
it's just an activity throbber -- destroyed their usefulness.

I don't know where it came from but everyone copied it and it's a massive pain.

It's hard to do in graphics mode, and also, percentages are not
trivial to calculate or show in OSes where startup is parallelised.
The startup process kicks off lots of others all as close to at once
as it can, and some complete and some don't and some never return...
do you count when they're despatched, or when they run, or when they
complete (in which case some never will)?

The way openSUSE does it is quite nice, IMHO. It shows an empty
textual box, the width of then screen, and it has about 2 or 3 other
bars overlain on top of it. One is dark green, then as that starts to
move (kernel and modules?), another in mid green appears on top (init
system?), and then another in bright gcreen on top of that (desktop or
GUI components?)

I don't know if they really represent different components or
subsystems, but they look like they are racing one another, which is a
valid comparison to what's happening underneath.

An alternative is the simpler method Windows sometimes did in the 20th
century: it says "stage _n_ of _x_" and then shows the progress for
that stage, not bothering to try to estimate the whole thing and give
very jerky progress as a result.
-- 
Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
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