> It is so remarkably slow, and I cannot begin to understand these people that are telling me that it runs fast. Granted, I tend to run older hardware

Always hard to interpret these complaints when the author won't reveal what hardware they're talking about, other than that it's old.

I think Zed is a great option for someone who is both highly critical of load times and has older hardware. I would not have recommended a JetBrains IDE given this person's requirements and hardware situation.

I use JetBrains IDEs on a daily basis and it's not a problem for me, even on my M1 Apple Silicon machine which is, what, almost 6 years old now?

That said, I'm not hyper-sensitive to things like a loading screen that takes a few seconds. I open the IDE once or twice a day at most and then leave it open. I tested it just now and went from clicking to being in the IDE and editing a file in 3 seconds on a cold start (recently rebooted) on my 6 year old laptop. When I read these anecdotes I don't know if someone has a broken environment (too many plugins installed?), a really old machine, or if they're just so hyper-sensitive that a couple seconds of loading screen seen a few times a day is enough to trigger them.