GTK4 apps slow to open

Support GNOME
1

I’ve begun to notice that the newer GTK4 apps such as Calculator, Calendar, Clocks, Text Editor are significantly slower to open than other apps.
I am wondering if it’s just me or do others notice this?
It seems like things like Gimp & Firefox are able to open faster than Gnome Calculator.

To find out, I used the extension ‘app startup time measure’ to get some results.
What are others experiencing? Thoughts on why these small utilities might be slower than expected?

gedit 433ms
text editor 2071

Firefox 1308
Calculator 1771

Gimp 2638
Calendar 2169

VLC 512
Clocks 1838

Libre office writer 1998
Gnome contacts 15211 (probably online account delay)

Incidentally, I happened to run systemd-analyze immediately before the Gnome42 update. There is a consistent +2 seconds on userspace loading after.

2

“Not I,” said the fly.

I saw that. Completely useless. Anecdotal at best.

Everyone has completely different hardware, not every experience will be the same.

3

Yes, I suspected the extension wasn’t really accurate, but certainly I can perceive a significant difference in launch time personally.
My laptop is less than a year old, but it is from the cheap end. Lenovo thinkbook14 g2, Ryzen 5 AMD 4500u, 24gb ram, nvme.

Regardless, surely there is some case for questioning why Text Editor has a really obvious delay compared to gedit ~ it’s essentially the same app.
I think you are probably the perfect person to help answer that ~ is there any reason why gtk4 Text Editor might be much slower to launch than gedit?

4

I seem to remember @Chrysostomus mentioning he noticed that, too.

Not at all. They have completely different dependencies.

5

The text editor is significantly slower to start than gedit. On my previous system, it was 5-15 seconds vs instant. On current one it’s 1 second versus instant. I never found out what was the difference as there is no significant performance gap between the systems :man_shrugging: