Sure… But the point is that it’s an apples to oranges compare when half of gimp is loaded by the OS at boot under Linux and at runtime on Windows.

I don’t use KDE any more so I don’t follow closely. But it used to be significantly slower. I recall some years back they were working to change KDE loading of gtk libs but I’m not sure what came out of that

for me, it takes a few seconds on my decent spec laptop. (kde)

Takes about a second for me.

You need to have libgtk installed to run gimp. It would be like running a Qt app (what KDE environment and apps are based on, among other apps like OBS, roblox, google earth, virtual box, etc) without libQt. You couldn’t because the dependencies aren’t installed.

Of course nothing is stopping you from running both, except maybe memory limitations on low ram hardware.

Or you don’t install it as you suggest and use alternative apps.