That’s very helpful to know, because even that has been challenging for my wife at times. Now that she’s somewhat used to it, and sees it on our “TV” her modest uses of it have been going pretty well.
No … your desktop portals do no denote what desktop you are using.
What it does show is that you have xdg-desktop-portal-gnome installed when you should not.
sudo pacman -Rdd xdg-desktop-portal-gnome
Afterwards your ‘firefox is slow, etc’ problem should be gone.
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Clarity is slowly emerging from the fog.
After reading: pacman {-R --remove} [options] <package(s)>
Um… Not today I think. 
sorry for typo, was supposed to be “and your problem is gone”
I don’t know if -Rdd is needed on x86, on ARM i simply did -R.
Won’t that mess up the gnome apps & dependencies I’m using?
I’m quite curious: Where did it come from? Will other stuff be gone too? What’s the dd after the -Remove going to do? Won’t whatever in the Update caused this issue be fixed in a subsequent update?
I’ve just started a Timeshift backup to a hard drive, in case you say this won’t hose up other stuff and I try it. I’m a bit cautious, having spent some time tweaking things. The slow FF isn’t an issue since I can just leave it open and clear history occasionally - even restarting it isn’t a problem now that I know to wait a minute. LibreOffice will be slow, but it always was if you call a few seconds problematic. Compared with my past computers (incl. the MacBooks) this Costco Dell is pretty snappy - esp. w/1TB nvme now.
Is the -Rdd still your unambiguous recommendation?
-Rdd simply skips dependency checks, but should not be needed as -gtk version of desktop portal comes as dependency with -gnome version, and will take over when gnome version is removed. -R is the safe way to remove things as it will refuse to remove if dependencies are not met.
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A consensus amongst you wizards seems to be emerging. I’ll wait for a reply from cscs about the dd and probably go for it, perhaps to find out how well Timeshift is able to zap me back to this timezone if I get sudden Dell death. Last time I tried to restore w/Timeshift it ended up taking a day or two because it was all there but wouldn’t boot. Maybe facing that again will finally get me some understanding of Grub repair.
I like that. I’ll still wait for cscs in case dd is needed in order to clear out problem dependency(s) that aren’t needed for the Gnome stuff that seems to be integral to the MATE I’m using. Quite a tangled web I’ve woven it seems! 
you are making it hard for yourself, as this was mentioned in the latest stable update thread, troubleshooting post #2 [Stable Update] 2023-06-04 - Kernels, Gnome 44.1, Plasma 5.27.5, Python 3.11, Toolchain, Firefox - #2 by philm
i hope i did not make it more difficult by suggesting -R should suffice over -Rdd, and i did it simply because i think using more force than necessary is unnecessary (and builds bad muscle memory) 
And it worked for me.
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Use with or without ‘dd’.
If it works with R alone, great, if not use Rdd.
(Its true you should generally avoid Rdd … I use KDE so just copying the announcement advice)
To find out more of where it comes from etc … follow the links … you will find a post from me 30 days ago over in Unstable - the advice has existed for these packages since then. That post will link to upstream Arch forum post and bug report.
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Thanks for reminding me of that, now more comprehensible & helpful, terse link. 
So if I actually do have gtk as it now seems, I guess you’re talking about this expanded line:
Workaround for gtk-based desktops (including Xfce)
sudo pacman -Rdd xdg-desktop-portal-gnome sudo pacman -S xdg-desktop-portal-gtk
It’s past pumpkin time here right now and my withering old brain is getting fuzzy, so I’ll wait for now. A problem at this point could keep me going like the old hacking days, but with far fewer functioning neurons. 
That second line is not even needed, it will simply tell it’s already installed
Thanks!
Of course, now I’m very tempted to go for it tonight. Is the second line:
sudo pacman -S xdg-desktop-portal-gtk
helpful, or did I expand the wrong subtopic (“Many applications (firefox, thunderbird, etc) slow…”) in the linked post?
Not really, as you already have it installed.
OK, here goes! 
It took 40 posts but we finally got you to uninstall that damn package 
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You people are the Best! 
It took far less time to do both lines (curious George at the keyboard) in MATE Terminal than to type this.
Firefox, LibreOffice, Gnome Text Editor and everything else I tried now opens in a fraction of a second again. Faster than I can time it w/o shooting a slow mo video.
Thank you to all my new heroes who took the time to help a hapless newbie. 
The takeaway for you here might be that it is safe to run pacman -R as it will refuse to do things that break your system. So just go for it and try for yourself even if you are unsure. If it refuses, you can force it by -Rdd and then your system might be broken to some degree.
If you followed the wiki guide, you unnecessarily used -Rdd but for the future don’t remember it as a tool to use before you do more research.
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Bottom line for me: Manjaro MATE is not dying. Thanks to all the patience, kindness and expertise so freely shared in this forum, it’s alive and running like a track star again.
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