Yeah I always disable search daemons/services, since I don't rely upon those features much, and likewise I also disable thumbnails on whatever file manager I use -- between the two of those that probably accounts for a lot of the slowness that builds up over time.
Another big factor is browser caches -- they degrade the storage medium and slow with age. I disable on-disk and persistent caches entirely in Firefox by setting `cache.disk.enable` to false in `about:config`. I've found that by doing all three, I prevent a lot of needless read/write/thrashing of my storage, and also increase performance a lot since there's less IO going on. With the proper configuration, I've found that any OS can stay fast over time.
Another big factor is browser caches -- they degrade the storage medium and slow with age. I disable on-disk and persistent caches entirely in Firefox by setting `cache.disk.enable` to false in `about:config`. I've found that by doing all three, I prevent a lot of needless read/write/thrashing of my storage, and also increase performance a lot since there's less IO going on. With the proper configuration, I've found that any OS can stay fast over time.