Did a little digging and research and came up with this from an Uber-Ubuntu geek who claims the latest Ubuntu versions have taken this into account and made those modifications. He claims....
@WoodPeckr -- if the silent default is relatime, that is a good compromise, IMHO. (Unless you're on something that really has that slow a disk with really strained resources.) The 'big program' that needed atime was the Mutt mail client, AFAIK. Mutt to this day, is a great mail client, but it will scare the console adverse. Odds are if Ubuntu defaults to relatime, so does Debian. I'm showing my 'Linux age', I've gotten so used to specifying it in the fstab that I haven't actually checked what the modern defaults are. I wonder if that is distro or kernel specific (I'll look it up)? Back in the day there was a big stink about even changing to relatime because of POSIX and UNIX compatibility... Even though on a 5,400 RPM disk the difference was night and day...
