It can boot and show a desktop fast after logging in. However, after that it seems still to be doing a lot in the background. If I try to open up Firefox, or any other app, immediately after I see the desktop it will take forever to load. When I let the desktop sit for a minute and then open Firefox it opens instantly.

Presumably a whole bunch of services are still being (lazy?) loaded.

On the other hand, my cachyos install takes a bit longer to boot, but after it jumps to the desktop all apps that are autostart just jump into view instantly.

Most time on boot seems to be spent on initializing drives and finding the right boot drive and load it.