Some distros have significant Emacs start-up configurations, which have an impact on start-up time. Using "-Q" skips this too. It's the case for Debian, so Ubuntu too I guess.

I used to use "jed" as a close to Emacs, light text editor to use for a quick edit from the shell. Nowadays I aliased jed to "emacs -nw -Q" (-nw: text mode, -Q: skip all configs), which subjectively starts instantaneously. And even a bare Emacs skipping the system an my configurations is very powerful. It also supports millions of colors with Konsole, so it's nice when reading code.