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I recently edited the canonical Q&A post with the inclusion of a very popular topic: How do I improve boot speed?

Now, a new question about this pops up (there is at least 1 new post per week about this), so I'm just curious about your opinion:

  1. Should this question (and most previous similar questions) be closed as dupe, and pointed to the canonical post I found?
  2. Or should we allow these posts to pop up all the time, and be answered individually?

I think you already guessed that I'm for option 1.

As a bonus element, I also lean towards downvoting most of these questions (at least if they don't include anything more specific than "How do I improve boot speed"), since their poster obviously has not done any research and hasn't found the many thousands previous posts about the same topic. Is it too harsh to feel this way?

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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If the user does not respond to the comment asking if the duplicate answers their question to explain why it does not, then the question should be closed.

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Whether or not to close a question as a duplicate of How do I improve boot speed? depends on the question. If the asker has provided a bootchart or even an excerpt from a bootchart this might provide a clue to finding a different non-canonical duplicate question, or if it doesn't seem to be a duplicate of another question it might suggest a possible solution.

Scattering answers all over the place might seem like a bad idea to some reviewers, but sometimes the answers for two different scenarios are mutually exclusive in which case I don't want to waste users' time trying out answers that I know wouldn't work. The better alternative is to separate mutually exclusive scenarios into different questions.

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While at first glance this question may appear to be a duplicate, drilling down into the details provided makes it abundantly clear to the casual observer that the user is operating under a misconception. The user is operating on a Western Digital 320GB Scorpio Blue SATAII 5400RPM hard drive rather than the SSD he states he has. This IMHO is clearly the root cause of his confusion. While 2 mins would be an incredibly long boot time for a SSD, it's certainly not for a lowly 5400 RPM HDD.

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  • I disagree, since several of the answers in the Q&A I linked to give this answers specifically: Here and here. My main point is that maybe all possible answers to "slow boot speed" should be collected in one canonical thread, or maybe they should be scattered all over the place. Right now it seems mostly the latter is the case.
    – Artur Meinild
    Commented Dec 30, 2021 at 10:27
  • @ArturMeinild edited answer.
    – Elder Geek
    Commented Jan 19, 2022 at 20:28
  • It doesn't make any difference. The user not knowing which hardware he uses is not a reason for a question not to be a duplicate - that's just a part of "lack of research". I still believe it's clearly a duplicate with every aspect answered here, but it seems the majority did not, and so the original question remains open and answered.
    – Artur Meinild
    Commented Jan 20, 2022 at 9:56
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    @ArturMeinild It does indeed indicate a lack of research which would indicate closing the question as "in need of more information" (rather than duplicate) if the information hadn't been included in the question. As you say, your opinion was noted, but your assessment didn't reach concurrence. Live long and prosper!
    – Elder Geek
    Commented Jan 20, 2022 at 15:44

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