Thanks for the suggestion. Adding these flags halves the startup time: $ time ./pwsh -NoProfile -NoLogo <<<'' >/dev/null real 0m0.456s user 0m0.388s s

Thanks for the suggestion. Adding these flags halves the startup time: $ time ./pwsh -NoProfile -NoLogo <<<'' >/dev/null real 0m0.456s user 0m0.388s sys 0m0.040s Much better, but I still wouldn't use this even as an interactive shell, as I open a few hundred terminal windows each day. There's no defender (or anything similar) on that other machine. It also has an SSD. With an older HDD powershell started in about 10-15 seconds there (while cold startup time for bash was something like a second, and instantly afterwards).