I just installed Endeavour i3 on a SanDisk Extreme Go USB stick and it seems to take a long time to open files and to open Thunar etc. I didn’t experience this on the same drive with KDE and XFCE. Is this anyone else has experienced? The computer is fast with 32GB RAM, 4.8GHz i7 CPU, it’s the USB stick read/write that is the weakest link in the chain. Thanks.
Hi Rick, I was wanting to have one copy of Linux on USB for maintenance and emergency purposes (fixing EFI issues, partitioning drives etc) and a running copy on one of the M.2 drives. I prefer GParted to partition a drive over any of the Windows or OS X software. I fancied trialling i3 on the USB to start with as it’s a totally alien environment for me and thought it would be fun. I had understood it was as lightweight and fast as openbox so suspected there might have been some kind of installation issue.
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never try that, but as Thunar is the same as for xfce4 i would more think of something screwed with installation. I do use installer ISO for rescue as we put most common rescue tools on the ISO for this.
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Try pcmanfm - is it still slow?
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As @joekamprad says it may be a bad install. It happens from either internet issue or other once in a while.
Hi all, thanks for the comments. pcmanfm seems to start up instantly. I did wonder about the installation the first time I ran it, it crashed during start up, the 2nd time I got some strange pixel mess on the whole screen for an instant, maybe a lightdm problem. All programs took up to 5 seconds to respond to opening, but seems quicker now, but still have the lightdm (?) issues. Point taken about the installer iso to keep on USB, its xfce its prettier than the one I installed from it anyway. May as well wipe this i3 installation. One thing that particularly bugged me was that after starting up pulse audio there was no way to close the window, it just sat in the middle of the screen on top of the tiled windows getting in the way!
it is [mod+c] //mod is the winkey// to close a window… you can move window by pressing mod and hold it with left mousekey
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Based on my experience with using i3wm, I’ve noticed that loading opening applications for the first time (including thunar) seem to take more time than normal. Opening them the second time and so, they open instantly.
Probably something to do with applications not being loaded in memory on boot; but I’ve got no idea about how OS works so no claims.
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My guess is that something is missing in autostart. Not in front of my sway (i3 for wayland) installation, but I can look it up later.
EDIT: do you have a notifier daemon installed? If not, try dunst or xfce4-notifyd. I remember having experienced slowdowns without notifier 2 or 3 years ago.
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Thanks very much for the assistance, everyone! 
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is installed and configured on eos-i3
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I installed Endeavour i3 on my NVMe drive now and doesn’t appear to suffer the same issue, although I will play around with it some more and I have a few things to look into above. Will do a bit of customisation. I rather like some aspects of the Archman i3 out of the box layout so may try to replicate some of that here. Cheers.