Why is GnuPG / GPG acting up ? After trying several things to fix encryption and decryption in GnuPG I have no real hopes. I honestly don't know what to do but to keep asking. I've searched on stackoverflow for pinentry and gpg-agent acting up and taking too much time and I only found one stack overflow question [\[0\]](#references) which didn't get that close to my issue. It slows down when using the pinentry-curses, pinentry-gtk-2 binaries. edit: I found out the problem! Thanks to [u/xXbobby123Xx](https://www.reddit.com/r/GnuPG/comments/q2apuh/comment/hpa3m6f/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) for discovering the solution, and this GNU forum: [https://dev.gnupg.org/T3240](https://dev.gnupg.org/T3240) it appears to be a bug in gnome-keyring. **Uninstalling the gnome-keyring is the solution for now.** there appear to be 2 dev.gnupg.org forum posts: - https://dev.gnupg.org/T3240 - https://dev.gnupg.org/T4592 (this url is kinda broken but didn't use to be) # the problem I've been using the [https://passwordstore.org] program for quite a while now, about 8 months I'd say. All was going well until about 3 weeks ago. I don't know what happened, what caused it or why. Pass started acting up, it took from 20 to 30 seconds what used to take literally 1 second. The pinentry-gtk-2 program was taking a whole lot of time to start. So I dug deeper. Eventually I found out that it definitely had something to do with GnuPG as decrypting files directly through GnuPG also yielded the same results, after all, pass is just a bash script that uses gpg encryption and decryption commands. So then I went searching on the internets and it was pretty bad. I couldn't really find any information regarding GnuPG acting up except for [\[0\]](#references), which ### reddit post [source: \[1\]](#references) First of all, your help, any help would be greatly appreciated. *Maybe this will be Unix/Linux specific, i don't really know.* Hello. I've tried almost* everything to get gpg up and running but it just, won't work! So, storytime. Almost after I went full linux I stumbled upon [pass](http://passwordstore.org), a great tool to manage passwords in a convenient way. I've been using it for around 8-9 months. And it's worked like a charm, until about 3 weeks ago. I don't know if this was a system upgrade or something but point is, it just slowed way down. When requesting a password, it'd take anywhere from 20 to 40 seconds to just show the pinentry binary (the one that asks you for the password), in particular, the `pinentry-gtk-2`, but guess what? I tried using the ncurses version also and it didn't work! I tried decrypting and encrypting files directly by using gpg, but yielded the same results!, cause after all, `pass` is just a bash script that uses gpg commands for encryption and decryption. So, yeah. After that, I tried searching on the internets, but didn't stumble upon anything at all except for [this](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/628092/why-would-gpg-pinentry-be -slow-when-opening-in-gui-but-instantaneous-when-openin) which didn't seem to solve the problem, as my problem happened with all `pinentry*` binaries (yes, even `pinentry-tty` !!). I tried the solution but it didn't work. Later on, actually yesterday, I hopped onto libera IRC to join the `gnupg` channel, as suggested by members in the `pass` channel, as this is clearly much more specific to gpg. In the `gnupg` channel I had the fortune to be able to talk to someone to walk me through a ton of things. Testing, after testing and testing. We even tried creating less-resource intensive keys, creating temporary gnu directories to store keys in, et cetera. I'm documenting most (if not all, ) this info at [this website](https://trevcan.github.io/gpg.why) . **Also, I should point out that the behaviour is not intermittent, _it is definitely constant_. I do have a password cache enabled, but every time time has passed or I manually clear the password cache (with `echo RELOADAGENT | gpg-connect-agent` and then `gpgconf --kill all`) the same behaviour happens.** I haven't tried this yet, but maybe later in the day I'll try booting off a linux arch iso and trying to install gpg and checking if it's my laptop or something... *maybe i will reinstall arch linux edit: add behaviour ## system Arch Linux. Hardware: T490. 16 GB RAM, 500 GB SSD. Intel core i7 8th gen. neofetch [\[2\]](#references) ``` $ uname --all Linux t490-4rch 5.14.9-zen2-1-zen #1 ZEN SMP PREEMPT Fri, 01 Oct 2021 19:03:23 +0000 x86_64 GNU/Linux ``` ## logs `strace pass show Test/random > strace.pass.show.test.random.out 2>&1` # todo - try with other linux kernels (current one is zen) - boot off a live arch iso and test there... - idk # inprogress - try with other kernels: - linux-lts, linux # done - yes i've tried with normal lunux kernel and linux-lts and linux-zen. . same behaviour for both. - live boot off iso: yes, there os a change, just does it instantly lol, which rules out hardware !! yayyyy. ### references - P.S.: hyperlinks open in new tab - [\[0\] Why would GPG Pinentry be slow when opening in GUI but instantaneous when opening in CLI?](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/628092/why-would-gpg-pinentry-be-slow-when-opening-in-gui-but-instantaneous-when-openin) - [\[1\] pinentry slows down all of a sudden. old.reddit.com](https://old.reddit.com/r/GPGpractice/comments/q26tsf/pinentry_slows_down_all_of_a_sudden/?ref=share&ref_source=link) - [\[2\] neofetch ](neofetch.html) - [understanding Apple's binary propert lists files](https://medium.com/@karaiskc/understanding-apples-binary-property-list-format-281e6da00dbd)