I've always liked watching the Linux boot messages. So first, we can get rid of the "curtain" or the splash screen that hides those messages.
sudo apt install -y gksu
gksudo gedit /etc/default/grub
In this file, remove the words "quiet splash", but leave the quotes intact.
From this:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
To this:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=""
Save and exit.
While you are at it, you could also remove the distasteful pink background:
sudo -H gedit /usr/share/plymouth/themes/default.grub
Change the color to something like 10,10,10,0.
Save and exit.
sudo update-grub
Now restart the system. In my case, there was a delay of one minute and thirty seconds. I noticed a message "A start job is running for dev-disk-by".
This happens because one of the partitions on the disk has a unique id that does not match the unique id stored in fstab.
On opening fstab (sudo -H gedit /etc/fstab), I noticed that it mentioned a certain UUID for the swap partition. I ran sudo blkid and noticed that the actual UUID mentioned here for the swap partition was different.
So it was a simple matter of taking the UUID from blkid and replacing the UUID mentioned in fstab.
Once this was done, the system booted without the long delay.