A nice compromise (besides obviously speeding up the saving) may be to hide the saving - just close the window so it looks like Etoys was stopped, but continue to save in the background. We could even display the progress of this in the Journal, just like Browse does while downloading.
Yes, that seems like an excellent idea.
Yes, this is definitely a direction worth exploring further. When designing the "in progress" visual for Journal entries, it was definitely my intent to support save operations in addition to downloads and copies (https://dev.laptop.org/ticket/2555#comment:1). I have also reported a bug on the time taken to stop activities in general, arguing myself that it's the perceived speed that really matters in this case, and stopping an activity should feel instantaneous (https://dev.laptop.org/ticket/2523). Feel free to add comments to either of these tickets; I'd really like to make this approach common practice.
- Eben