"One of the generally accepted rules of computing seems to be that if you retain the same hardware and upgrade the operating system, then you can expect it to run slower. For example, Windows XP runs pretty well on my laptop, but Vista would be barely useable.
"This seems to have been accepted as a fact of computing. But noone seems to have told the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community. They clearly don't subscribe to this idea!
"Ubuntu 8.10 'Intrepid Ibex' Alpha 6 absolutely flies on my laptop. It boots faster and generally feels more responsive than the 8.04 version, which again felt faster than 7.10 and 7.04.
"At the same time, I have a lot more applets loading on startup (and software installed generally) in 8.04, so I will be interested to see what happens when I enable them in 8.10. I suspect that things will just be faster in 8.10 anyway as the quality of FOSS just keeps increasing.
