But I doubt that internal file fragmentation is an issue on today’s large hard drives in any halfway modern filesystem.

I’ve just learned by painful experience that I’m badly wrong on this point. At least if one counts NTFS on Win2003 as “halfway modern”.

Sporkinum: yeah, Linux does have a long way to go with drivers, but it’s not all Linux’s fault–it’s that whole “proprietary driver-versus-open source” can of worms combined with Linux’s relatively-marginal user base. If Linux continues to pick up users, I suspect we’ll see a few more drivers hit the repositories. (Although that won’t solve the proprietary software issues.)

Aiden: I wish there was a Scrivener for Linux. Although I probably would still find ways not to write. Because I suck.

Cheers.

My only issue with ubuntu/linux is crappy video drivers. I can’t get open gl to work, and some things like full screen video decoding ,like on you-tube,have crappy performance. I have a radeon 9800xt.

I have Mandriva 2008 running on my desktop at work and it runs great. All the Compiz eye-candy, video decoding, the works. But it runs Intel mobo graphics, and the new Mandriva won’t even give me a screen to try to fix the video modes.

Linux has a LONG way to go for driver support.

Also, whenever I hear a guy (like my SO) complain about the command line, I’m reminded of the classic User Friendly “Men are from Macs, women are from VMS.”

As far as I can tell–and I’d love to see an even bigger geek than myself weigh in–Linux’s default filesystem needs less defragging than FAT-based filesystems, but will suffer slight fragging eventually as a disk fills.

ext3 will fragment, yes. If you don’t have enough space after a file to write more data, you either have to (1) write the extra data elsewhere, or (2) move the data in the way out of the way. (2) will cost performance, and I’m not aware of any filesystem that will do this as part of normal operations. But I doubt that internal file fragmentation is an issue on today’s large hard drives in any halfway modern filesystem.
However, seeks between files are very much an issue; and ext3 is better at locating related files in close proximity than FAT. There’s no fundamental reason I know of that FAT couldn’t be similarly intelligent, but FAT drivers have historically been pretty primitive. Even with good drivers, the location of the File Allocation Table will hurt performance.
But be that as it may, neither FAT nor NTFS nor Ext3 can know what future access patterns will be. Disk optimizers do have their place, just not for defragging.