Thank you for the responses. hopefully we can get to the bottom of this. FYI, I tried to post a lot more pictures in this response, to help demonstrate what I see from my end, but the New User restrictions limits me to 1 image. I guess I can create additional responses if you want screen shots of specific routines or diagnostics.
With respect to user accounts, the PC has 3 accounts already. I tested this on my account, which has full admin privileges, and my child’s account, which has basic user privileges. I observed the same issue on both accounts. If you feel that creating a new account is still worthwhile, let me know and i can try.
I ran sudo apt update but it returned everything as being up to date.
I ran sudo apt --fix-broken install and it returned no issues.
Here is the Snap list:
I have launched most of the applications on that snap list, and they are all very slow to start. However, I have launched applications not on that list (e.g. Steam, LibreOffice, etc.) and i observe the same issue. However, not everything is slow to launch. I can access the Budgie Desktop settings and system settings without issue. I can launch the budgie screenshot application at full speed (which i launched several times while making this post). I tried the built in mini-games of solitaire and 2048, and those are both as fast as expected. The new Xfce Terminal starts right up without issue as well. hopefully this indicates some common thread between apps that are slow, and those that run as expected.
Here are some other behaviors that I am observing. Hopefully, this helps reveal what the issue could be.
First: I receive the following error message when i launch the Budgie Welcome Center:
This Snap is running on a distro that is unrecognized or on a development release of Ubuntu that has not yet received its snap configuration. Full snap capabilities are unlikely to work
Second: Only since upgrading to 24.10 / 25.04, and with the latest installation of both Google Chrome and Brave Browser, I am unable to download files when the browsers are configured to prompt me to choose the file location. The “choose location” window will appear, but when i click “save” the download is never initiated. I found some mention of this through Google searching, with the following thread describing the same experience. It’s worth noting that when i disable the “choose location” dialog and just have either browser download direct to a pre-determined path, then the download initiates as expected.
Link to forum post on download issues
Third: When i first updated to 25.04 i was running an old, out-of-date version of Chrome. Last update was probably 6+ months ago. Interestingly, this version of Chrome worked flawlessly. Launched immediately, and had no issues downloading files via the “choose location” dialog. I assumed that Chrome was somehow immune to the issue, so i went ahead and updated to the latest version. Unlike my previous attempts to update Chrome, this time I was able to download a *.deb installation file, which brought me to the Software Center. I had never installed Chrome via this method before, but i clicked “install” and went ahead. The result is that Chrome now suffers from the same slow-launch as Brave and Firefox. Basically, updating from the old version to the new version introduced an issue where there was none previously. As i described in the second point above, the slow launch was accompanied by the inability to save files via the choose location dialog.
Lastly - I searched pretty extensively on this topic before posting here, and found very similar descriptions of this issue, but from older versions of Linux. Here is a post describing my issue, but from back in Ubuntu 19.10:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1184774/some-applications-on-ubuntu-19-10-very-slow-to-start
The recommendation was to run sudo apt-get install appmenu-gtk2-module and then reboot, but when i attempted to do this, it appears that this package is no longer available. I do have appmenu-gtk3-module installed. I validated this by running dpkg -s appmenu-gtk3-module and it provided me with the package installation status. running dpkg -s appmenu-gtk2-module returns no results. I don’t have this package installed.
That’s all the clues I have at the moment. Just to reiterate, i was running 24.04 without any issues, and this problem was definitely introduced when i migrated to 24.10. The issue persisted when i migrated to 25.04. For both migrations, I accepted when asked to remove obsolete packages.
-Matt
