> This wasn't the kernel. It was doing something else. I googled for it and others had the same issue but I never found where there was a fix. Odd thing is, it didn't do it every time. Just most of the time. When I was having network problems, it added a few more wait times. Once it took about 5 minutes from grub to a login prompt.
>

I get that the installation is gone so we'll likely never know what happened but that said I would have thought sudo dmesg after a login would have probably shown if something weird was holding up giving you a login opportunity.

Strange to me that you didn't investigate it.

I have 4 Ubuntu-based machines here and over the last 6 years I've never seen a 1 minute delay to login, much less 5 minutes.

When I look in the kernel ring buffer on my desktop machine I see most everything done in 14 seconds from power-on. After that there are some delays on the order of 90 seconds for a wireless network I don't actually use much to be authenticated, and then a few apparmor comments out around 5 minutes, but none of that impairs normal login.

I think you are better off running Gentoo. You do you, right?

I hope the new setup works well for you.

- Mark