Most of the bloat isn’t from the kernel. That’s the last thing you really optimize after getting rid of all the background services, startup tasks, etc.
I think you misunderstood. I was saying in a typical stack, time from POST to desktop is significantly overshadowed by userland bloat, not that Clear kernel is not worth the optimization.
Yeah, but a stock arch system is significantly less slowed than a typical stack. Getting to bootloader is still significantly longer than actual OS boot, though. I'm not usually a supporter of the "all software has to be open source" thing, but between spying issues and horrible code, it seems like coreboot is a serious benefit. Wish I could get it on my machine.