I put an ssd in a laptop from 2003, it boots to desktop on antix just as fast as my T14 running opensuse.

When this laptop was running XP spinning rust, it took 5 minutes to get to desktop, 10 minutes to do anything useful. SSDs have made that possible, pretty much nothing to do with anything else.

My dad had a C64 that I'd play around with, and I can confirm, it booted in seconds. Loading a program was a different matter.