I see a lot of text-editing environments geared towards "distraction-free, focused editing" but not a lot of innovation on an OS focused on the same experience. I would like to see such a "writing OS" that boots to a text editor in less than a second. Maybe this OS is a candidate?
The hardware compatibility list shows a promising number of machines ( http://www.menuetos.net/hwc.txt ). If you have a spare one, you could try and report. There is a chance that you will achieve a very fast boot time.
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AROS (Amiga) could reboot in ~7s, ~15yrs ago. And you can do more than you can with MenuetOS. Again, today you will probably break that record.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yNIuNnBrWg
Edit:
You can see here a recent AROS booting in 3s (it is not clear if it is bare metal though):
The virtualbox window is pretty clear to me :D
Anyway: I thought I have here a laptop I have to initialize, maybe I will install IcarOS on it as soon as I will have the time. So, we will see how it behaves on bare metal.