I have a 5 year old Toshiba Linux Mint laptop, i3 processor. It was sluggish to load Linux.
A few weeks ago I replaced the 1 Tb hard drive with a 500 Gb SSD.
I tried to copy from-to and never could get the start-up to recognize the new drive, so I did a fresh install from the Linux Mint 20.3 ISO.
Now, my boot-up is about 12 seconds. Previously, it seemed to take well over a minute. It is surprising how much faster an SSD boot drive is.
Boot time is a red herring IMO. I really don't care how long it takes for my desktop to boot, since a reboot only happens about once a quarter, or often longer than that. On this computer, I keep the kernel pretty current, since it is my main box, hence the quarterly reboots. My media player, though, will run for hundreds of days without rebooting, because that box is fairly isolated from a network perspective. What do I care if it takes 5 minutes(it is considerably less) if it's something I only have to worry about once or twice a year?