Why is OpenOffice slow?

[Loïc Martin]

Arjun Shankar a écrit :
> 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...
>
> Arjun Shankar
>
You might want to try the binaries from openoffice.org, they might be 
faster. Firefox is noticeably faster when using the mozilla binaries 
against Ubuntu ones (which have a configuration problem due to pango), 
the bug was known before Dapper release but to my dismay I don't think 
it got corrected. And when I say noticeably faster, it *noticeably*

See https://launchpad.net/products/firefox/+bug/32561

So yes, it could be Ubuntu-related.

For fairness, you could also compare between Open Office under the 
latest Fedora or Gentoo. If OO is really slow under Ubuntu, unless 
you're a programmer and can fix it, you can compare the time you loses 
with its slowness against the time necessary for a Fedora install or a 
Gentoo one (between half an hour to a few hours).

There's advantages and drawbacks to each distribution. Apparently Ubuntu 
maintainers don't really have the resources to fix the speed, nor do 
they consider it as a priority (read everyone's comment on Firefox bug. 
If you don't know who is a main developper, check their emails or hang 
around ubuntu-devel for a while). That might mean they won't really have 
time to answer to your post :)

OTOH, between fixing a bug that prevent us to use Ubuntu or fixing a 
major speed problem, it's true it's better to fix the first category of 
bugs (you only notice the slowness if you can start the OS :) Good thing 
other distributions have had the resources to care for speed too (but 
they have their own difficulties too).

Cheers,
Loïc