Nautilus does not start and if it does takes crazy long time to do so

[Joachim]

When starting nautilus (either via clocking the button or using the terminal) after startup, nautilus does not start at all.
Starting it via the terminal results in a Timeout error.

I can though see the process in the system monitor.
If I terminate the process via "End process" and then start nautilus again,
the nautilus window appears after around 20 seconds.

I then get the same behavior if I want to save a file from within an application.
E.g. if I click "save file to" within inkscape, it will take around 20s until the file manager window open.

I purged nautilus and reinstalled it already, but it did not help.
I also followed a stackoverflow answer, saying that you have to

sudo apt-get purge xdg-desktop-portal-gtk

Right after I did that, nautilus was starting immediately.
But after a reboot the effect was gone and I was back with the old problem.

Suuuuper annoying.

Best

Joachim

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 20.04
Package: nautilus 1:3.36.3-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.4.0-52.57-generic 5.4.65
Uname: Linux 5.4.0-52-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu27.11
Architecture: amd64
CasperMD5CheckResult: skip
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Fri Nov 6 10:56:51 2020
InstallationDate: Installed on 2020-04-23 (196 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS "Bionic Beaver" - Release amd64 (20200203.1)
SourcePackage: nautilus
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to focal on 2020-08-31 (66 days ago)
usr_lib_nautilus:

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report.

Could you do
$ journalctl -f

trigger the issue and copy any error from the log? do you have other softwares having a such slowness?

It could be useful to get a gdb backtrace during the time nothing is happening (as described on the already running section of https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Backtrace)

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

There was a similar issue discussed on the GNOME channel today pointed to https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gvfs/-/issues/485 , could you try if that command unblocks things for you?
$ killall gvfsd-trash