My god, doesn't that amount of time bother anyone? 3 whole seconds is an eternity on modern hardware.
As an aside, I've been trying out Ubuntu for the last 6 months, and this is one example of the lack of polish I'm seeing. I don't remember installing gnome-characters explicitly (it's possible I just forgot doing so), but there are two versions on my machine, one of which happens to have this crazy startup lag. Another annoyance is that firefox came installed as a snap, which meant that all of my downloads went to something like ~/snap/firefox/Downloads instead of the expected ~/Downloads. I don't remember these kind of things happening when I ran Fedora...
The thing is that I've never used anything faster than an i7 + HDD (with GPU). So when my old one died, I just started using my ever so slightly slower laptop as main device.
I firmly believe that as long as you have not experienced the difference (which I haven't) it does not bother you. Applications don't start lightning fast, when I open the terminal I need to wait a second before I can start typing. So I start Spotify, Firefox alongside my terminal and after ~10 seconds I'm up and running for the rest of the day.
I'm not that bothered about waiting 10 seconds each day.
Let me put it this way: A 2nd gen i5 can execute about 6 instructions per cycle per core. At 3Ghz, that's 18 billion instructions every second or 5e-11 seconds per instruction. If each of those instructions is a second to the processor's subjective experience, then 18 billion of them is about 570 years. It takes 3 times that to startup an application for typing text into a document.
I didn't even take multicore into account.