[zozbot234]

> I swapped the spinner for an SSD and OH MY GOD THE DIFFERENCE.

FWIW, that difference isn't nearly as noticeable under Linux. It's so lightweight on RAM and so good at caching frequently-accessed data that it can be incredibly snappy even when using spinning rust. SSDs mostly speed up your boot process and the rare IO-heavy workload. Though it wasn't until the late 2000s-early 2010s that RAM began to be truly abundant on out-of-the-box configs, and that was the same timeframe as the switch to SSD's.

[tonyarkles]

I strongly disagree, especially when running RAM-heavy applications where background tasks end up getting put in swap to make room for caches. For quite a while, there was actually an issue where the OOM-killer didn’t get triggered because swapping to the SSD was so fast that certain timers in the OOM system would never trigger. Instead of recognizing that the system has become completely unusable and killing off a process, it would just sit and thrash uncontrollably.

If I recall, Ubuntu 16.04 still suffered from this. And Android Studio could very reliably trigger this situation on my older/upgraded early i7/16GB RAM/SSD laptop. Hard power cycle to recover.

[lproven]

I totally disagree.

When I was preparing to emigrate in 2014, I put an SSD and a big HDD in my desktop-replacement laptop, and the transformation was a revelation. Ubuntu 14.04 went from booting in only a minute or so to booting in a single-digit number of seconds. It was astonishing.