Comment 29 for bug 1491064

My workaround for making scientific posters is to use different layers for different parts of the poster, and to lock all layers except for the part of the poster I'm currently editing text in. This seems to deal with most of the slow-down when using no layers, but is does make editing more difficult due to the need to continually lock and unlock layers. (Using Inkscape 0.92 on Archlinux, but have experienced this problem with previous versions of Inkscape for years).