I installed NixOS a few days ago and I use Sway as my WM. The big problem is that every application has a really long startup time.
Take Nautilus (GNOME File Manager) as an example. It takes ~30-40 seconds to start. Same goes for Firefox, Steam, and pretty much every other program I have installed. This also is the case for flatpak applications.
I suspect it has something to do with the xdg-desktop-portal.
Do you have a persistent .cache/mesa_shader_cache/ directory? Programs require shaders compiling at first start, it can take a while (but certainly not so much time, but this would depend of your specs)
That’s not a real product But it doesn’t matter; I was mostly asking in case you were running on either very weird or very old hardware. If that’s not the case then it’s very odd to have this problem.
I removed xdg-desktop-portal-gnome.
I now don’t have a desktop portal for GNOME apps (Nautilus, etc.) but applications start as expected. This is kind of weird, because using both desktop portals on Arch worked just fine for me. I will definitely look further into this.
Thank y’all for your replies.
I have the exact same issue as op, but I have a much simpler setup. I know sway can work well on this same machine because it did so before I reinstalled with a much simpler set of configs. Where before I had lots of stuff pulled in from gnome manually. This has simplified the config and everything works, except that every single app, including the terminal, takes at least 30 seconds to open. I now just have