First you can try disabling animations, i.e., setting the animation speed to ‘Instant’ (System Settings → Workspace Behavior → Animation Speed). Then the launcher will appear much quicker when you press ‘Start’ / the ‘Meta’ key.

Then you can try disabling some search plugins. To the right of the search field in the launcher, there’s a settings icon. Click on it and then on the ‘Configure Enabled Search Plugins…’ button. (The name of the button is misleading; you can also disable plugins here.) A good strategy is to first disable all plugins and see if this helps. If it does, enable each plugin you need, one by one, until the search becomes slow again.

Her name is 王OK (thanks copy paste!). I like the first YouTube comment, which described her voice as ‘like a warm blanket during a cold winter morning’.

Hildegard von Blingin’ sings like an angel: https://www.youtube.com/@Hildegardvonblingin/videos

I don’t think this is exactly what you‘re looking for, but for cross stitch patterns, KXStitch can import images and create simplified designs with a reduced number of colours and cells/pixels. The KXStitch handbook gives a nice overview of all the features.