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I have no problem on my personal laptop (i7, 8GB RAM, SSD), but on my work laptop (i5,6GB, HDD) it is horrible. I can wait up to 10 seconds before it appears... I just disabled the Super key binding on that computer.

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HDD vs SSD would be my guess. I suspect it does a lot of disk accesses like loading icons, loading .desktop files, opening index, ...

Is it faster, when you open it the second time?

On a very slow netbook, I noticed that Unity 12.04 (LTS version) opens quicker on the second and subsequent invocation than on the first. However, there is still a significant delay. I suspect the searches and time taken to build the various lenses is the reason. Gnome Shell appears to be a lot snappier because the search does not happen on that first screen.

Does anyone remember Mac OS Spotlight? Took ages when first introduced (10.3?) then got loads faster on the same hardware. I'm hoping the same will happen with Unity.

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