I find many apps on both Linux and Windows are slowed down by disk operations. You may say "get an SSD then". Well, not all your users will have an SSD, and if

I find many apps on both Linux and Windows are slowed down by disk operations. You may say "get an SSD then". Well, not all your users will have an SSD, and if they already have one, then what? You could maybe offload some stuff into RAM, but many users have just 8GB, and you're not the only thing using it. If you write a voice recorder for example, you _already_ know that the first thing you will do is scan the directories. Do this during start-up, let the user know that the system is initializing and then for the most part you only need to check your assertions are still true just before recording. In general I think we need to make people care about performance more. The only thing I can think of is to make running on low-end hardware part of the validation process.