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Slow Acroread Startup in OpenSuSe 11.0

It takes more than 30 seconds for acroread to load on my Opensuse machine the first time and the startup time gets shorter in subsequent attempts. Why? This is not the first time I have come across this problem of slow application startups in OpenSuse.

Apparently a lot of people had encountered this problem and they found a simple solution - uninstalling the version of acroread that comes with OpenSuse and installing one from Adobe site yourself. Fortunately, that prescription seems to have solved the problem. My acroread startup time is a few seconds now.

Why does a very good Linux distribution like OpenSuse with its wide support and following make so many of these mistakes?!?! Over the years, I have seen Suse/OpenSuse sending buggy distributions that make you wonder if they do much testing before releasing their distro. Here are a few bugs I have come across:
  • The extremely slow startup of Openoffice in OpenSuse 10.0 was one of the reasons I switched to Fedora Core for a while.
  • Firefox was incompatible with some KDE themes, even though OpenSuse uses KDE as its default desktop environment.
  • XMMS crashed inexplicably when ...
I really wish OpenSuse and Novell do some serious QA testing before releasing their distros. Otherwise, they risk losing their loyal following.
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Comments

Anonymous said…
Hi there,

I'm glad that the install from adobe.com solved your problem.

If you face any problems with Adobe Reader (or acroread) in the future, please feel free to report them at the user forum http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.3bc433df/
March 15, 2009 at 11:56 PM
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