[PSA] GNOME Files (Nautilus) very slow in unstable post 2025-11-03

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If you’re on NixOS unstable, then GNOME Files (Nautilus) will become very slow, as well as a RAM hog, once you upgrade to a version newer than about 2025-11-03. The system journal (journalctl) will show logspam along the lines of

Nov 18 01:23:45 localhost org.gnome.Nautilus[22570]: While adding page: duplicate child name in GtkStack: Documents

This is a known issue, Nautilus Very Slow When Setting Templates Folder to "$HOME/" (#4014) · Issues · GNOME / Files · GitLab, and should go away once Glib 2.86.2, containing Backport !4886 “gutils: Strip all trailing slashes” to glib-2-86 (!4890) · Merge requests · GNOME / GLib · GitLab, is released and @jtojnar pulls it in.

In the meantime, the workaround is to open ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs and replace

XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/"

by

XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME"

that is to remove the trailing slash from that variable. You may also have to manually kill all extant instances of .nautilus-wrapped afterwards.

(If you’re reading this in the future when Glib 2.86.2 has already been released and are still observing a similar-seeming issue, then it must be something else.)

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Shouldn’t this be in Announcements or Guides rather than Help?

Hell, this seems like it’d fit better in the breaking changes announcement post, even if this is a bug and not a breaking change.

Maybe we need a separate thread for these, a bug PSA thread, or altogether category? It happens often enough, and not enough people read github issues (though in part that’s because those tend to be written in less plain language, and often involve debugging details).