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I've tried a few Linux distros on a range of older laptops which have Windows 10 installed on them. Linux was installed as a dual boot on a separate partition to Windows. After installing Linux, Windows would boot normally in around about the same time as it did before partitioning however, the Linux distro (Ubuntu, Debian, Manjaro and Linux Mint) would boot really slowly and I've noticed long periods of no hard drive activity during this time. After long gaps of no hard drive activity the OS would boot to the to the desktop. But it would take at least 3x longer then Windows 10 cold booting.

I'm not sure if this is just a problem affecting me or is this a problem with dual booted Linux.

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  • What desktop environment are you using in Linux? What is the computer model? Some distros and some desktops take significantly longer than others to boot. The last version of Windows I used was Win 7, and that took forever to boot with a HDD. I don't know how Win 10 compares, but even the slowest Linux is way faster than Win 7. Mint and Ubuntu can be on the slow side for Linux, especially if you use a heavyweight DE like KDE. Manjaro is pretty optimized, so that with a lightweight DE ought to load relatively fast. (cont'd)
    – fixer1234
    Jun 2, 2019 at 20:14
  • Dual booting shouldn't affect anything. After the initial delay to allow you to select the OS, boot time is the same as the single OS. If you're seeing a long delay with no hard drive activity, that sounds like it's doing a lot of hardware identification or diagnostics, or searching for a network connection or network printer, that isn't typical after installation.
    – fixer1234
    Jun 2, 2019 at 20:15

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I expect that the no disk activity is a symptom rather then a cause - maybe the bootup is stuck waiting for a network related function to become available.

To debug this go into grun and remove "quiet" from the kernel parameters. This will cause the next boot to noisily show you what is going on and will likely give you a hint as to where the problem is.

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