Ever since I can remember, the booting time and application startup time served on desktops as a subjective performance meter akin to 0-100kmh (0-60mph) for cars. Besides that, faster startup and less waiting makes people happy, instant-on being the holly grail. Also with open operating systems like the UNIX-based ones, desktop users find satisfaction not only in customizing for looks but also for speed. "Desktop" being the key word.
I'm not saying OpenRC should necessarily replace RC but I think it would benefit everyone if RC made use of today's multiple core hardware for parallel startup, had built in daemon tools and include niceties like colored boot messages to instantly spot problems.
I strongly disagree here:
- on my state of the art desktop system, UEFI post takes most of the boot time (30s plus), OS boot is just a fraction of that (Linux with upstart about 7s, FreeBSD maybe 12 to 15s). Suspend and Resume is about 1 second for both. Windows is similar. Nothing to fix here, really - we could talk about the resilience of the suspend function in FreeBSD, though.
- Each and every boot sequence must be identical and race conditions should be impossible by design, both for operational safety and for security. FreeBSD's RC system delivers that, parallel startup makes this difficult, if not impossible.
- "Nicely coloured boot messages" is what systemd gives me. Too bad that they flash by too fast to be read and cannot be found in a log file later. I prefer a simple "dmesg" to tell the whole story, as on FreeBSD.