[ken_yap]

Tweaking can only do so much.

Except for beagle, I don't find that turning off daemons does much, unless you are desperately short of memory. Their footprints are in the order of tens of MB. Firefox's footprint easily swamps that.

Removing packages does nothing except free up some disk space, which is cheap these days. If you never use OO, it makes no difference removing its packages.

Fast graphics cards, fast disks and controller, fast CPU, and most important, sufficient memory help a lot.

Compilation optimisation a la Gentoo may get you some increase in speed but I'm not prepared to have my machine grind away for hours just to get it. It may be worth it for some CPU intensive programs like encoders and media players, but those already use tricks to select the best code for the CPU.

I'm not willing to use lighter but less capable versions of software just to be able to run faster, if it means I have to spend more time coping with lack of features I want. With hardware so cheap these days, over the lifetime of the computer the time wasted outvalues the saving in using a slower machine.