fldigi slow startup on Linux

I’ve installed fldigi on an Arch Linux laptop computer, and I’ve hit an issue right away from the start: The startup time of fldigi on this computer was around 130s from the start command until the UI (User interface) display showed up. During this time one of the CPU cores hit 100% and stayed there while “starting”…
On my desktop computer, that is much older and has at least less than half the processing power of the new laptop, fldigi started up right away and had no issues with CPU occupation.

It took me a while to find out the cause, and with the source code available (yay for open source) I’ve found the issue at the confdialog.cxx file specifically here:

Fl_Double_Window* ConfigureDialog() {
  Fl_Double_Window* w; 
  font_browser = new Font_Browser;
  ....

A lot of the time was lost inside the call to the new Font_Browser.

So I’ve checked the fonts installed on my new computer, and low and behold: 1248 more or less fonts !!! compared to 234 installed fonts on my desktop computer.

Comparing the Arch Linux packages that I had installed on one computer and on the other, the laptop had the ttf-google-fonts-git AUR package installed which added the bulk of all the fonts.

Removing this package solved the issue with fldigi startup delay. With the fonts removed fldigi started right away as soon I execute the command to start it up.