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While all the linux office suites except koffice and the gnome equivalents are generally too slow, people should remember though that Office 97 is 5 years old, and Office XP is immensely slow on anything below a P4 with 256MB of RAM (my Duron 800 with 650MB suffers on it).
Hopefully once openoffice reaches feature completion, there can be some serious work put into speed optimisation by Sun to make it operate at somewhere near the speed of the more lightweight systems.
It's not an easy problem to solve. The issue is with libraries - things like OpenOffice need all their code loading from scratch because they don't use standard libraries. Koffice and the GNOME equivalents have the huge advantage that much of their code (Qt and GTK respectively) is already in memory on many systems. This makes load time and the application footprint much smaller. Couple this with the slow link time C++ programs suffer because of limitations of GCC compiled code, and you have a system which is sluggish to load at the best of times, and requires lot of memory. -- 9:26am up 22 days, 18:53, 2 users, load average: 0.17, 0.07, 0.02