That's the time stamp for that part of the boot process in seconds. There will be (should be...) text on the line to say what it was doing at the time.
Back in the day you could actually see the text but these days it flashes past so quickly that the timestamps are, IMHO, less useful.
That explains why it's useless as a code, thank you!
Any thoughts on why I'm being presented with the logon screen and then being given a timestamp after it has loaded?
I have never worked that out - it's probably to do with display modes/buffers being swapped around whilst the machine starts up.
Back in the day it was text only but these days you have systemd starting up all sorts of stuff and boot managers doing likewise... And something in the mess is either not clearing something or reusing something that it shouldn't.
If you run the dmesg -H command in terminal you'll see the whole boot log (might need sudo).
I'll give this a go next time it happens - thank you.
Just as a little update - I'm still not sure what caused it (although it does definitely seem to be systemd being a little odd because I temporarily reverted to sysvinit and it didn't happen) but today I ran sudo apt autoremove and after restarting the problem went away. It seems something left over by an old app just.. made this happen.
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