During the move over to Linux I noticed that a couple of my main applications had a significant performance hit at startup. Both Obsidian and VSCode took a very long time to start up and get to a UI that I could use — more than 20 seconds each.

Confirming on another machine that this issue didn’t exist under Windows I began to look around the to see if anyone else had reported a similar problem. I found an issue on the VS Code forum that seemed to be what I was experiencing. While nobody had an explanation as to why this was happening, there was a workaround to at least make the problem go away located on another thread.

It seems to have something to do with how GPU acceleration is implemented / used within the Electron core — the framework on which both Obsidian and VSCode are based. With that in mind I tried the same workaround with Obsidian and it worked there as well.

I filed a bug report for Obsidian as well, hoping that one of the two dev teams will eventually be able to sort this out without having to resort to the workaround.