If there is any thing I think Linux distributions can definitely improve upon is to reduce the default IO task priorities while running a Windows manager (e.g. GNOME or KDE).
What I have found out over time is that the default IO priorities tend to cause the UI very sluggish when doing heavy IO operations (e.g. copying files between disks, etc.). While this problem is not inherent to Linux (Linux is only the kernel), The default sluggish behavior under heavy IO conditions makes popular Linux distributions (e.g. Ubuntu) less user friendly than it should.
While using ionice can solve this issue, it isn’t very continent as it needs to be manually set every time the user performs heavy IO tasks.
It is true that the performance of the main-stream hard drives/and controllers (e.g. SATA) is partially responsible for the sluggishness of the UI response and higher end disk sub-systems like serial attached SCSI alleviate this problem to a certain degree, for Linux to really go main stream nevertheless, this problem should not be overlooked as SATA is the common disk sub-system almost all main-stream users have.
Since copying large files is such a common task nowadays, why couldn’t we just lower the default IO priority settings instead of relying on user to use ionice? In general, most end users care more about the UI responsiveness than the background disk throughput.
