Some tweaks i did for Fedora 43 on the Macbook 14,3. Mostly improving boot time and removing bloatware

1. Boot Speed & Hardware Cleanup#

The biggest win came from stopping the kernel from searching for hardware that doesn’t exist (like legacy serial ports).

GRUB Optimizations: Edit /etc/default/grub and add these to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX:

  • 8250.nr_uarts=0: Disables legacy serial port probing (saved ~7 seconds).
  • intel_idle.max_cstate=1: Keeps the CPU from deep sleep states for instant wake-up.

Service Cleanup: Disable some services i don’t need/run

# Disable network wait and bug reporting
sudo systemctl disable NetworkManager-wait-online.service
sudo systemctl disable --now abrtd abrt-journal-core mcelog ModemManager
# Mask the locate indexer to stop disk thrashing at boot
sudo systemctl mask plocate-updatedb.timer

2. Desktop change#

Moved away from Cosmic Desktop, was really nice and quick but i don’t need a full desktop environment, so decided to come back to Sway(fx)

These is what i’m running for my desktop#

  • Window Manager: Sway(fx)
  • Launcher: Fuzzel
  • Status Bar: Waybar
  • Power Management: power-profiles-daemon
  • Notifications: mako

Visualizing the Boot Sequence#

The chart shows exactly the time for each step at booting. Hardware initialization and services.

Systemd Boot Plot