I assume you're running proprietary drivers? Because I've never experienced anything like that on mesa. Launching an app that opens a window with a gl or vk context is so fast on my almost 10 year old hardware that it's nearly imperceptible.

There must be some quirk of whatever combination of software packages are installed there, but the proprietary drivers are not the culprit, at least not alone (i.e. there could be some interaction with other software packages with which I have little experience, like Gnome).

I have been using the proprietary NVIDIA drivers for more than 2 decades on various hardware, both desktops and laptops, mostly with Gentoo Linux.

Opening an OpenGL context or any other OpenGL operations have always been instant.

So the usual self inflicted misconfiguration then.

In similar style I recently wiped a device that I thought had firmware that was slow to boot but it turns out that a hang and subsequent timeout due to something I had long ago misconfigured had been obscured by the previous setup that defaulted to hiding all details during boot.

I had this problem on Fedora and my RTX 3090. Never got to the bottom of it.

We can only hope that the company building the hardware on which this new age of AI is based on soon starts "vibe-optimising" their own driver stack.

They don't want other companies to train on their IP and regurgitate it to random people.

You should profile that, it is probably hitting the registry, the disk and maybe the network.

Try turning off wifi and see if it improves.

i'm on linux

No idea about your setup but that's probably a fixable driver issue. My desktop with an RTX 40-series GPU takes _maybe_ 4 frames to create an OpenGL context.

it's a stock laptop on a stock linux distro install, X11 + i3

Well its NOT normal for stock Linux of any kind, something specific to your setup must be off.

linux without the proprietary nvidia drivers is slower than the proprietary ones. try switching to them if you can. either way nvidia is worse on linux than amd.