It does not matter unless you reboot your machine every hour.

Literally don't personally care about boot time, as long as it's under 30-60s (currently at about ~5?), and since I reboot like once a month, I don't really pay much attention to it. How come you want to minimize that so much? Any particular target you want to achieve?

Stop rebooting, problem solved!

# systemd-analyze time

Startup finished in 39.050s (firmware) + 6.680s (loader) + 993ms (kernel) + 3.519s (initrd) + 22.326s (userspace) = 1min 12.570s 
graphical.target reached after 21.680s in userspace.

for me, most time is used until the bootloader shows up, because I had to disable "fast boot" in bios because it made some problems on rebooting. pressing enter in grub could speed up 5 seconds more ;-) gentoo, systemd, 2x2tb nvme, 32 gb ram, 4 hdds. could be faster, but it mostly doesn't matter because I power on the system every morning but don't use it right away

edit: on my server, which is not UEFI, therefore has no "firmware" part:

# systemd-analyze time
Startup finished in 1.814s (kernel) + 47.640s (initrd) + 36.602s (userspace) = 1min 26.057s 
graphical.target reached after 36.602s in userspace.

and on my laptop, which boots fast AF

# systemd-analyze time
Startup finished in 4.242s (firmware) + 14.631s (loader) + 1.737s (kernel) + 3.210s (initrd) + 5.136s (userspace) = 28.959s 
graphical.target reached after 4.936s in userspace.

1. a few minutes. Usually I expect 2, claim 5, but when updating gitlab or something equally bloated I'll need 7-10 for the patch-and-bounce.

2. no one cares whether it takes a minute extra while you're getting coffee or when it's in the middle of the night. The #1 selling feature of systemd is thus moot and it's truly just a piece of hot garbage.

Linux 6.5 Should Spend Less Time Waiting On PCIe Devices: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.5-PCI

Last time I rebooted the laptop it was about 30 seconds... six months ago.

Seriously guys, why the boot time that important nowadays ?

I don't care about boot time. I switch her on and then go and grab a coffee, by the time I'm done she's finished booting.

My server takes about a minute but it's a dual core Atom with 1.8gb of ram >_<

About twenty seconds from 'power button' to 'desktop' on my laptop, about two minutes on my desktop, mainly because it's got about 9 disks in it in various RAID patterns, and a discrete graphics card and fancy USB audio and all that shit needs initialised. Doesn't matter much, they both sleep / hibernate and rarely need restarted