N.B. "Long time" means an unpredictable value typically between 30-300 seconds
1. Terminal windows take a long time to become ready to accept input.
2. My "irb" program takes a long time to load.
3. Finder takes a long time to list files, even when there aren't many files in the directory.
4. Finder takes a long time to generate previews of files
Only perhaps related to slowness, but extremely annoying: incorrectly implemented iPhone sync leads to my conversational counterparties hearing the ringing chime well after the conversation has begun.
Have you tried to troubleshoot the cause of this slowness? What you describe is not normal behavior for any OS. Some aspect of your system is broken. If it's a hardware problem, installing a linux distro won't help. If it's not, installing any OS from scratch (including Yosemite) will fix it.
N.B. "Long time" means an unpredictable value typically between 30-300 seconds
1. Terminal windows take a long time to become ready to accept input.
2. My "irb" program takes a long time to load.
3. Finder takes a long time to list files, even when there aren't many files in the directory.
4. Finder takes a long time to generate previews of files
Only perhaps related to slowness, but extremely annoying: incorrectly implemented iPhone sync leads to my conversational counterparties hearing the ringing chime well after the conversation has begun.
Thanks for the link to rEFInd.