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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

The last time I installed the Ubuntu, I noticed gnome calculator took over a second to start in a VM on a new >$2500 laptop.

I switched to a .deb, and it was instantaneous. Then I switched back to devuan and have been happy since.

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Yeah, it's almost as bad as the calculator in Window 10. It's completely ridiculous for ANY calculator app to take that long to load on a modern PC.

What’s wrong with the windows one? It’s instant and it calculates things?!?

IIRC it tries to connect to the internet in the background to download currency exchange rates

It takes a couple seconds to start the first time you launch it. Very much not instant.

What about the second time?

Then it's in cache.

Yeah, I'm confused as well. I just tried Calc on win10 for the first time in weeks or months and it opened before I could count 2 seconds. This is from a SSD where it won't have been in cache.

2 seconds isn't instant.

It's 100% instant on my computer. No delay from pressing enter and it opening.

The calculator was a snap in Ubuntu 18.04 as an experiment.

Ah, this makes sense now! I've always wondered why the calculator (of all apps) was by far the slowest to start on 18.04 for me.

I was wondering why the calculator took so long to start on 18.04. I thought there was some problem with my system.

Doesn't bode well for 20.04. I've been with Ubuntu for a very long time, I like that it just works most of the time. May be time to try out another distro if all the applications are this sluggish.

The good news is that 18 is one of the super-LTS releases, so you don't have to upgrade until 2028.

A good time to ask I suppose: Is Devuan stable and does it carry security updates and package repositories equivalent to normal Debian? If so I'll probably switch myself.

It largely uses debian packages, so it gets the same uodates. Only packages that require systemd are modified by the devuan maintainers to run w/o it.

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