Why is OpenOffice slow?

[Michael T. Richter]

On Sun, 2006-02-07 at 18:07 +0530, Arjun Shankar wrote:

> Okey, I didn't really bother about this till I saw OpenOffice running
> on Windows machines at the place where I train. OpenOffice works
> REALLY slow on my notebook (running only Ubuntu, so I can't really
> compare, how it is on other operating systems myself), but it's
> reasonably fast on those windows machines, which arent really all that
> 'better' than my litle piece of computing power.



> So why is it that something thats open source is faster on a non-free
> platform, than one thats free?



> I know this isn't exactly related to ubuntu; still...


I think this is an artifact of X.  X is a bloated pig in comparison even
to Windows (!).  I've always found X to be sluggish (since my days on
Sun workstations in the dark ages).  Get some of the lighter window
managers (XFCE, fluxbox, etc.) and it's OK, but the full-featured ones?
Painful.  For example I can't reliably drag things.  X will get so
screwed up refreshing the window/icon/whatever of the object I'm
dragging that the mouse "loses" the item.  If I'm in a folder with a lot
of files and trying to drag one to the desktop it's even more painful.
The cursor will "lose" the item I'm dragging and 9 times out of 10 will
pick up another one.  I've become very used to using ^X/^V instead of
dragging and dropping as a result.  Similar problems exist with
selecting text or anything like that.

--
Michael T. Richter
Email: ttmrichter at gmail.com, mtr1966 at hotpop.com
MSN: ttmrichter at hotmail.com, mtr1966 at hotmail.com; YIM:
michael_richter_1966; AIM: YanJiahua1966; ICQ: 241960658; Jabber:
mtr1966 at jabber.cn

"Then, of course, there is the feeling that something sexual must be
something very happy, a marvelous experience. When this develops, I
always see the negative side." --The Dalai Lama
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/attachments/20060702/2fe8efe9/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 191 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/attachments/20060702/2fe8efe9/attachment.sig>