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?
“Boot time is a red herring IMO. I really don’t care how long it takes for my desktop to boot”
Same here, but I have never had a Linux box take as long as a Windows box to boot. I just go get another up of coffee while my box boots and it is ready when I get back.
No need to wait.. Multitask...