[orca-list] First impressions after the migration to Ubuntu 12.10

[Luciano de souza <luchyanus gmail com>]

Hello all,
I have been using Ubuntu 10.10 and Orca 3.2.0 for a long while. Now, I 
decided to upgrade to Ubuntu 12.10. The first impression is a whole 
chock. If you are acquainted with Gnome, it'll be natural to have 
difficulties with the new interface.
I don't know if it was a good idea, but after installing the new system, 
I have upgraded it. Opened a spreadsheet, I noticed that Orca does not 
interact well with Calc. It means a lost since in Ubuntu 10.10, I have 
used Libreoffice successfully.
Compared to Ubuntu 10.10 and Gnome, Ubuntu 12.10 and Unity has  much 
more lacks of accessibility. One of them is found when we press alt+F2 
to access a prompt to type commands. If the command is wrong, there's no 
way to know it.
Actually, I decided to upgrade to Ubuntu 12.10 becose, in the previous 
version, there wasn't newer deb packages of Orca. Having installed the 
version 12.10, I noticed Orca was upgraded from 3.2.0 to 3.7.0. I don't 
follow constantly the news of Orca, but I was expecting for improvements 
in web navigation.
Orca has the magic command "o that allows us to find text eazily, so it 
would be nice to read texts by means of Orca if it didn't pause before 
links. That's true. Texts with lots of links, for example, Wikipedia 
texts, can't be read freely. As Orca stops before each link, the reading 
is so trunked that I prefer to copy the text to read in Gedit. This is a 
severe, really severe issue.
The lower performance is another negative aspect. I have a trio with 
3.26 GHZ and 4 gigabytes of RAM> It's not a top machine, but it's not a 
justification for so bad performance. With Ubuntu 10.10, I got 
performance much lower than Windows, but better than Ubuntu 12.10.
There are to main types of user: the common, worried only with the usage 
and the testers, worried to search for new features. I have some fear of 
instalations and upgrades. When you have your life stored in your 
machine, the  possibility to lose it is terrible.
So I would like some orientation to select the more accessible 
distribution, the more  stable and featured Orca and the best graphical 
user interface. Is Ubuntu the best option? Archlinux? Fedora? Open Suse?
For my current distribution, Ubuntu 12.10, I ask:
1. Is there a way to use Calc spreadsheets?
2. Does someone know tips that can improve Ubuntu's performance?
3. Is Orca 3.7.0 the newer version available in deb package?
4. Is there something to eliminate the pauses when Orca reads links of 
webpages?
I have writen this message in Gedit. When I tried to copy to 
Thunderbird, the information of "alt+tab" was very confused. Sometimes, 
it stops in the wrong option, sometimes it stops to read. In Ubuntu 
12.10, does Orca behave as described?
Well, if someone has any tip to become eazier the migration, I will 
enjoy very much!
Best regards,
Luciano