It’s a universal truth that all PCs are slow. All of them, no matter the hardware, no matter the OS, they’re slow. The faster it goes, the faster we want it to go. It’s never enough.

Linux is slow too. Take Ubuntu, or OpenSuse, or Mandriva. They’re certainly faster than Vista, but compared to XP, not so much. And don’t get me started on booting, because Windows always has had the advantage there.

That’s why distributions always promise to be faster the next release, or why Red Hat/Fedora are developing Plymouth (which should make booting faster and more attractive). I must say I never noticed much difference between releases. Real speed umprovements for me came from using Arch, which is compiled for i686 computers, or ditching Gnome/KDE for lighter alternatives like Openbox.

Enter ext4.