Hi,

I'm not on KDE but need to use some KDE applications such as Krita for professional artwork.
I'm also dependant on Dolphin (the only file manager I've found that previews .kra files) and GwenView.
Both of these (Dolphin and GwenView) take A LOT of time to start up.
Sending items to Trash also takes longer than I would normally expect (it used to work fine).
Krita seems to start up and work fine.

Any idea on what might be the cause?

I'm on Linux 5.19.3-arch1-1
My windows manager is a very minimal one coded by a friend. I'm not using any DE, just the WM.

I had this same issue with my prior installation running a full fledged Plasma (KDE5) desktop.

Is there a way to track down what's going one while the apps are starting?

Here's some extra info:

I just had to reinstall my system because of a hard crash that ruined the partition. The laptop (Thinkpad P53) hunged up while updating with pamcan -Syu. On reboot the partition was gone from rEFInd. I had had issues for a week or so with several laptop freezes, and suspected on some KDE thing (I was using KDE then), but didn't have the time to track it down before the system failure.

Anyhow, I decided to try with another WM. But I do have to work with some KDE applications, like Krita and Dolphin.

Any help will be very much appretiated

I think I kinda "solved" it. Tracked the problem, at least.
It was the graphics card (NVIDIA Quadro RTX 3000 on a Thinkpad P53). Running a Wacom Cintiq24 at 4K gave me further problems than the KDE apps startup delay, it even crashed the system a few times.
Without an external display and the laptop screen at 1080p seemed to work just fine. So I tried reducing the Cintiq's resolution to 2K and now everything seems to work as it should. The crashes happened after a few working hours, so we'll see how it goes during the day. The fan isn't running so far (it started running after a few minutes at 4K), and the KDE apps now start at the speed I expected.

Cheers