Linux loads the gtk libs when your desktop starts because it's a major component of gnu/gnome. Windows doesn't until you launch an app that would use it. It's not a small library.
Wait, so are people going to claim that the start-up speed is the problem with GIMP on Windows and not the god awful UI? This is the problem with the Linux crowd. You guys write software to write software and not because you are a user of that software. A clunky UI - which is far, far too common on open source applications - will cost someone a heck of a lot more than a few seconds in getting work done.
Everything seems to be way faster on Linux than on windows for some reason.
On one occasion I tested a build that took ~10 min on windows, in a Linux VM installed on the same machine, it finished in ~1min.
I have searched around for an answer for quite some time now, I could not find any definitive reason. Some say that process creation is slower on windows, some say IO is inefficient. Still struggling to explain 10x increase in throughput.
Am I going crazy or something? Gimp loads in under 5 seconds on windows for me, and that's with an absurd amount of crap (unity, blender, a vm, and 400+ browser tabs across 5 browsers) running in the background.
In my case Alacritty on Windows 10 takes like 30 seconds to open + 15 seconds waiting for Powershell, on Linux Mint Alacritty + Fish shell takes only 1-2 seconds to open
Actually it seems like even on an SSD GIMP takes a few seconds to load nowadays on Windows and yet Fatdog64 loads it within a second or two. Anyone else tried Fatdog64 or any Puppy Linux OS?