HDD I/O is slow, on old computers [mostly found in small bussines companies] needs to be speeded up.
Nowadays we have tons of free ram like 6 gb 8 gb, why dont use part of it like ramdisk/"swap"
just need to add litle program to ubuntu default instalation, to build a ramdisk and then ability to prefetch full program what user use.
ramdisk-> create
prepopulate on every boot -> select a app name/ folder with files
it will greatly reduce load time of programs, but increase boot time a bit.
in corporations users use like 2-3 programs so preloaded to ram would be nice
in case of security maybe add auto checking the content of folder and backup it every 5 minutes to original folder on HDD [diff backup]
after "preloading" folder or programm, make a symlink to ramdisk, not the normal disk.
