I don't know if it was in the author's console, but I beat it by first adding sp5100_tco to the blacklist, and won a couple of seconds, and then disabling UFW, and won about a couple of seconds too.
At first it was.
reboot: systemctl reboot 7s, GUI xfce 15s
shutdown: systemctl reboot 11s, through the xfce GUI 31s.
After disabling these two items it goes like this
reboot: GUI xfce 11s
shutdown: via GUI xfce 14s (probably by accident)
The final boost became, but this only applies to home machines closed before Steam. It became as much as 2.41s !