It depends what you mean by a "normal telescope" (all telescopes used for astronomy are designed for specific tasks/roles, even if that's not called out in publ

It depends what you mean by a "normal telescope" (all telescopes used for astronomy are designed for specific tasks/roles, even if that's not called out in public-facing material as much). LSST is not the first large scale optical survey (and previous telescopes have chosen to have a wide field of view, but they've been quite small in comparison), and there are tradeoffs to trying to use such a large field of view (e.g. having to correct for lots of distortions, both in the design of the optics, and in software), but because of the large collecting area (being a 8-meter class telescope), you can go much fainter faster (and with higher signal to noise) than a 1-meter class telescope that has the same field of view. Wikipedia has a bit about what makes LSST special (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_C._Rubin_Observatory#Comparison_with_other_sky_surveys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_C._Rubin_Observatory#Comp...). I don't know when they're going to start observations, but I suspect there'll be loads of announcements of cool new transients soon after.