I was planning a fresh Linux install on an old computer with a not-so-powerful hard drive. I read that different file systems (due to different internal data structure and architecture) might perform differently. For example, Ext4 is a well known and stable file system which performs quite good pretty much always, but in some cases "competitors" like XFS might be better (with parallel I/O for example).
Given a normal scenario (programming environment), which one would you suggest, based on your experience? And why (this is actually the more interesting part)?