Nothing. This is because system is not just "kind of fluff", but in reality, all current computers are small service center with near all need service equipment, running on startup.<p>They testing floppies, CDs; check for printer on LPT; spent many time to figure out what USB stuff connected to computer, etc, etc.<p>And don't forget, setup scripts are basically running on extremely slow Shell language, which is interpreted and keep simple for considerations of system service. - For example, some systems used Perl for shell tasks, but now it avoided, because too hard to support Perl itself, so people decided to return to Shell and concentrate on it.<p>Second, most current systems are monolith type, so they cannot load-unload drivers on demand, and have to load some typical configuration as one big piece at startup and check all it's parts.<p>You could manually disconnect many checks in startup scripts, you could even customize list of your drivers, but these are really big hassles, and big amount of work.<p>Some systems now remade to include trick, so their startup running on background, so some things you will got much faster, but if you try to use them too soon, you will see, that some things you may need, are not accessible already, but will appear later, for example on my Ubuntu on core i7, SATA SSD, I measured from 30s to about 100s before all appear.<p>To be honest, exist many minimal OSes, with microkernel, compiled shell, and other features, making them startup very fast, but unfortunately, none of them considered mass production, all are experimental.<p>Even special OSes, like Ubuntu touch, considered for Smartphones, are mostly considered as secondary project (non main priority), so even with all their limitations, you will not got even as workable solution as classic Ubuntu.