Comment by nsagent

It really depends on the software. I have the top-of-the-line M4 Max laptop with 128GB of memory. I recently switched from Zotero [1] to using papis [2] at the command line.

Zotero would take 30 seconds to a minute to start up. papis has no startup time as it's a cli app and searching is nearly instantaneous.

There is no reason for Zotero to be so slow. In fact, before switching I had to cut down on the number of papers it was managing because at one point it stopped loading altogether.

It's great you haven't run into poorly optimized software, but but not everyone is so lucky.

[1]: https://www.zotero.org/ [2]: https://github.com/papis/papis