BTW: One of the larger contributors to desktop lag on linux continues to be the lack of integration between the scheduler and the WM. The idea that demand pagin

BTW: One of the larger contributors to desktop lag on linux continues to be the lack of integration between the scheduler and the WM. The idea that demand paging is causing a lot of general latency doesn't ring true to me. Maybe on initial startup, but once the machine get started most OS aren't doing actual disk io to satisfy random user interactions. Things like the windows sendTo list, which is actually a bunch of links in a directory (unlike most of the rest of the shell which tends to be registry based) end up cached in ram and don't actually result in disk IO (and you should delete entries you don't use). You might argue all the user->kernel crossings build these lists on the fly are a problem, but frankly unless you have a incredibly long lists of file associations, etc a few hundred API calls don't contribute to the overall lag much. On linux (which always seem to trail on the responsiveness metrics) a lightweight DE can help, but scheduler tuning makes a even bigger difference. Just switching the power profile to performance is far more noticeable on linux than most other OSs. If your not aware of the work of Con Kolivas you should read up on the history there. Everything is a lot better than it was 15 years ago, but a number of the core problems really haven't been solved.