It do be like that
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Better than waiting for GIMP to load fonts, I'd wager.
What do you mean? Doesn't it just use the fonts installed on the system?
When I load it, I get the message, "Looking for data files" and below that "Fonts (this might take a while)". And it does take a while.
Weird, when I start gimp it just speeds through a floating window with different inititialization steps that are all about the same duration (<2s for the whole thing to start though).