I was running 8.0 on an AMD 800mhz computer and was quite happy but once I loaded 8.2, things slowed down considerably. If I tried to start OO, it would spend 3 minutes showing me the 'frame' of the window with the desktop showing through, then it would fill in the window... but still it would take about another 2 minutes for the keyboard to become active in OO.
That's not the way OO(o) starts on my 8.2 machine. (This has 512MB of
RAM because the increase from 256MB cost peanuts and I had a hunch that
it would be worth it. And it has a 2GHz CPU as this was the cheapest
available bar one, and the man in the shop told me that it generated
less heat than, and thus was a better choice than, the sole cheaper
CPU.) I might have taken the option to have OO start up quickly -- I
really don't remember (how would I look?) -- but I certainly have done
nothing to reduce the bloat of KDE, etc.: I have animated icons and all
the other gimmickry. I would play with these things, but I'm too
timid/ignorant, and anyway most delays with this computer are minimal
and don't irritate me at all. (Indeed, it's so fast that I happily
installed folding@home, which is doing its thing even as I type.)
What annoys me much more than slowth is the combination of two major
irritations:
(1) OOo Writer successfully imitates MS Word (and WordPerfect and Lotus
Word too, I suppose), hiding controls where I can't easily get at them.
(Well, I believe that I can open the ZIP files, edit the XML contents,
rezip, and rename -- but this seems unnecessarily tiresome.) So, just to
take one example, how can I hide a chunk of text? With good old XyWrite,
I'd flip into command mode and insert "<