I find that abiword on easy debian is much quicker than OO writer The typical startup times I get where I can start typing a document are. Open Office (starting from outside LXDE) 1minute 20 seconds Open Office (starting from LXDE) 1 minute Abiword (starting from outside LXDE) 20 seconds Abiword (starting from LXDE) 10 seconds Depending on which version of OO you have the timings can improve (up to about a factor of 2 improvement) but never come close to Abiword. On the other hand, Open Office is a little better at reproducing word documents than Abiword. Documents to Go Premium is faster than both. But you only can, as far as I can tell, just make text documents. If you need to make equations you are out of luck. You can make equations with OO writer and Abiword. Abiword will also output your document in Latex. These timings are for the case where I do not overclock. I'd like to see a similar comparison with overclocking.