Dealing with the revolution

Linux and SSDs
Linux is in a little better position. While it, too, has been tuned over the years for spinning platter drives it has by default four different I/O schedulers selectable at boot time: Anticipatory, CFQ (Completely Fair Queuing), Deadline and Noop.

Anticipatory and CFQ (the default scheduler) are designed to optimise throughput for desktop and small server systems, while Deadline is designed for intensive server and database workloads. Just like with Windows' single scheduler, none of these were ever designed with SSDs in mind.

But the Noop scheduler, by its very nature, isn't too far off. The Noop scheduler is basically little more than a simple FIFO queue and is designed to be used with high-performance disks and external controllers that handle scheduling outside the OS – and so essentially passes requests straight through with no interference. Which just happens to make it ideal for SSDs.
As schedulers can be assigned on a per-disk basis in Linux, it's possible to use CFQ on hard drives and Noop on SSDs in the same system.

Then there's the filesystem. As with NTFS, filesystems like Ext3 are designed with hard disks in mind – however Linux has two filesystems in development designed specifically for SSDs: LogFS and UBIFS, both of which are under consideration for use with the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project.
LogFS differs from traditional filesystems in that it works with the page size, large erase-write block, and fast seeks to optimise performance as well as extend lifespan by not re-writing blocks in place (overwriting a file moves it to a new block, for example). Developed by some brainboxes at Nokia, UBIFS is similar and works on top of the UBI (Unsorted Block Image) layer in Linux's MTD (Memory Technology Device) layer.

Both are nearing maturity for entry in the mainline kernel, but can be used in the meantime by patching the kernel.

Still, like Windows, Linux runs a variety of background tasks and while it generally isn't as intensive as Windows it still has a habit of writing log files and so here, too, the default setup of most Linux distributions isn't with SSDs in mind. A bit of tweaking and using the Noop scheduler will go a long way to ensuring better performance.

Optimising for SSDs
Make the most of an SSD with the following tips for Windows and Linux.

Windows
* Move the page file to a hard drive (disabling not advised with Windows).
* Redirect Windows temp directory to a hard drive.
* Redirect browser cache to a hard drive, or disable it.
* Disable SuperFetch (Vista), Prefetch (XP).
* Disable Indexing service.
* Disable System Restore.
* Disable NTFS last access timestamp.
* Disable background defragmentation.
* Disable unnecessary services.

Linux
* Use Noop scheduler (add elevator=noop to kernel in Grub).
* Add 'noatime' option to drive mounts in /etc/ftsab
* Move '/tmp' to a hard drive or ramdisk.
* Move '/var' and even '/home' to a hard drive.
* Move swap partition to a hard drive, or disable it.
* Redirect browser cache to a hard drive, or disable it.
* Disable unnecessary services.
* Use LogFS or UBIFS, if you're feeling brave