I feel like a text editor should not take ~5 seconds to start up. It's slower even than Visual Studio Code, which has a ton more bloat. My computer is quite new and high-end (i7-9750H, 16GB DDR4 RAM, 512GB Intel PCIe NVMe SSD). Using KDE Neon, with a fresh install from less than a week ago; everything fully updated.

Anyone have a similar experience? Is it because of the snap-pack thing?

Naah! I haven't faced any such issues yet.

While running snaps would be expected to be a little slower due to the extra overhead from running in a container with all the libraries bundled, or whatever; 5 seconds does seem a little extreme.
Testing using the native install, kate opened practically instantaneously. Installing the kate snap, the first run took somewhere around 10-15 seconds or so (just counting in my head and then I stopped waiting after about 10 seconds), but then subsequent launches from Discover launched in about a second. Playing around some more with it, launching the snap version from menu or from krunner would take closer to 5 seconds while launching from the command-line would take about a second. Meanwhile, launching the native version consistently opens in less than a second.

(testing using plasma 5.12 on Ubuntu 18.04, native kate and kde apps version 17.12.3, KF 5.47.0, Qt 5.9.5, snap kate version 19.08.0)

Perhaps there is a bug in how the desktop launches snap applications?

airdrik wrote:While running snaps would be expected to be a little slower due to the extra overhead from running in a container with all the libraries bundled, or whatever; 5 seconds does seem a little extreme.
Testing using the native install, kate opened practically instantaneously. Installing the kate snap, the first run took somewhere around 10-15 seconds or so (just counting in my head and then I stopped waiting after about 10 seconds), but then subsequent launches from Discover launched in about a second. Playing around some more with it, launching the snap version from menu or from krunner would take closer to 5 seconds while launching from the command-line would take about a second. Meanwhile, launching the native version consistently opens in less than a second.

(testing using plasma 5.12 on Ubuntu 18.04, native kate and kde apps version 17.12.3, KF 5.47.0, Qt 5.9.5, snap kate version 19.08.0)

Perhaps there is a bug in how the desktop launches snap applications?

OK, just confirmed. Kate starts almost instantly when installed natively, so the problem is something with launching the snap from the menu (I was launching by right-clicking a file and saying open with kate).