alright its not perfect but it works now and im kinda fed up with the whole topic of webbrowsing at minimal boot time so maybe ill try some things at some point for now im calling it.

right now i have magic mirror set up on a windows notebook (that i use for server tasks and that runs day n nite anyway) following the tutorial on this forum using git bash.

works perfectly and i personally find it much easier to handle / make changes and so on.

on the pi side i have a pi 3 b+ running chilipie-kiosk a ready to use kiosk image availble on github.

it works easily and user friendly out of the box. however i did whatever i could to tweak the boot time. by deactivating every service i didnt absolutly need. i also tweaked the config.txt to disable boot delay, splashscreen, audio and bluetooth and overclocked the pi as well as the sd card (didnt even know that was a thing :D).

oh and chilipie-kiosk implements a 15 second delay where it covers the browser windows up to hide chromiums page loading process which first i disabled but then noticed the whole screen would flicker white before the page was shown so i figured out that for my setup 5-6 also do the trick. im really not happy with that but im not going in for another try with some other browser setup.

i might try to start chromium a bit further up the chain/ earlier.
also i do still wanna try to make th whole thing read only / move the swapfile to a usb stick or maybe even the whole damn thing but with speed as a focus but more so for long term reliability.

@sdetweil didnt work but again i realized i dont actually need all that on the client side. the server runs perfectly on the pc and the client im gonna try using just the most basic webbrowser setup (which seems to be tough to find since no one cares about boot time when using borwser at startup and the other way around also noone cares about networking capability when looking at boot time)

@sdetweil well thanks but gtk keeps throwing warnings in my face about not being able to access display or something. and at this point i figure i dont need all this crap just a webbrowser opening a page on startup preferably from cli and as fast as possible. some ready-to-use solutions look promising. looking at fullpageos right now. some other kiosk tutorials also promising but most of them arent really paying attention to boot time as they assume a kiosk would just run all day.

alright so now i have my server running and working on a windows notebook following the guide on this forum.

i had problems getting mm to run on stretch lite and noticed how the instructions called for full stretch so i switched. now technically its running.
but the autostart only works when booting to desktop, which costs time.
pm2-pi.service in general eats too much damn time.
so back to console and scratch the pm2.
but i have yet to figure out how to run it from console at all.

@dazza120 not sure what you mean by that and usind an ssd sounds expensive for this kind of project and really like a hassle tto setup. is thze pay-off that good?

@sdetweil thanks i will think about it but nontheless id still have to boot up every time and therefore i need to figure out boot time

@sdetweil thought about it but with the ratio of time that the light/power is on to the time the light/power is off being as it is. i dont think thats a solution since any battery pack will run out of juice eventually when you pull more than you put in.
i thought id try running read only first but if it doenst work guess i could get a small ups board to at least shutdown and wake up properly.
but right now boot time is a somewhat more important problem to me. sadly i do need network and wifi. and graphics. all not very optimal. ill see what i can do i guess.

starting off with Raspbian Stretch Lite on a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ for the bathroom client

…or do i absolutly need the full version?

sooo…i been playing with this idea in general for a while now before i finally discovered MagicMirror² to be the perfect solution for what i was planning on doying all from scratch.

this thread i thought could be helpful to those who also want nothing but MM² on there pi.
Disclaimer: Im not new to software/-development but i am new to linux and all that comes with it soo correct me, give some tips and suggestions if you think im being stupid.

heres the deal:
im mounting the mirror in the bathroom.
construction is done.
the problem is my bathroom doesnt provide constant power at all. everything is linked with the light switch.
shit.
so ill run MM on a second pi i have up and running all the time anyway.
and run the bathroom pi as client only.
…with the fastest boot time i can physical do given my limited expertise.

ill go through all the steps i do and try, wether they work or not.
im hoping when its done it can be helpful for others and while im tinkering i hope the community can help me out with some helpful tips here and there ;)