I’m not a computer expert or planning to be. I’m just a computer user, a coder, a gamer, and I think I will get the opportunity to afford cheaper PCs if I use the Arch distro from Linux which is very lightweight and fast. I’ve heard Microsoft forces you to bloat your PC with win11.
I’ve installed both Arch (systemd) and Void (runit) on the same laptop as an experiment to see whether you could have them both coexisting on the same filesystem. (Which you can - main difficulty is keeping their kernel names separate in
/boot.) There was very little difference between them in time-to-desktop. Arch was faster, if anything. And I run more services on a desktop than I would on a server.Choosing init scripts over systemd is fine for philosophical reasons or if you prefer it for maintenance, but speed isn’t an issue. Init scripts are simpler, but systemd goes to great efforts to start things in parallel. Critical servers should be load-balanced and redundant anyway so that you can restart them for updates; whether they take a second longer to start-up doesn’t matter.
In my own experience, runit is much faster to boot than systemd. Perhaps your experiences differ but I know a lot of people say the same.
I agree start-up time is not a big deal. I just mentioned it as it’s the only real performance difference I’ve noticed between OSes.