The New Hotness

A month or so ago a Manjaro update caused all file loading to take minutes, rather than seconds. This sort of breakage seems endemic to rolling update distros, although most glitches vanish within a few days as more knowledgeable users track down the problems and apply the fixes.

File loads and program startups continued to be achingly slow, so I trawled the Interwebs in search of a resolution, tried various suggestions, and had no success until:

sudo pacman --remove xdg-desktop-portal-gnome

Some background information:

• https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=285590
• https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/xdg-desktop-portal-gnome/-/issues/74
• https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/pull/985
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2176759

A description of what a desktop-portal is all about:

• https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_Desktop_Portal#List_of_backends_and_interfaces

When using Free Software, when it breaks you get to keep all the pieces. In this case, I do not profess to understand how the pieces fit together.