How I fixed my painfully slow decryption process when using GPG to decrypt files

I use qute-keepassxc add-on with my web browser qutebrowser. However. I’ve been experiencing some painfully slow delays when trying to run this command (which is needed to the add-on to work):

$ gpg --use-agent --decrypt /home/johan/.local/share/qutebrowser/keepassxc.key.gpg

(FYI: This is basically the only thing I use GPG for)

This took me ages, if it even worked, which resulted in that I had to manually copy and paste my credentials when I wanted to login to a website. Which is obviously not fun or a recommended thing to do.

However. I have finally found the issue!

This reply on superuser.com mentioned the tool updates-alternatives --config pinentry. I ran it and noticed this:

# update-alternatives --config pinentry
There are 3 choices for the alternative pinentry (providing /usr/bin/pinentry).

  Selection    Path                      Priority   Status
------------------------------------------------------------
* 0            /usr/bin/pinentry-gnome3   90        auto mode
  1            /usr/bin/pinentry-curses   50        manual mode
  2            /usr/bin/pinentry-gnome3   90        manual mode
  3            /usr/bin/pinentry-tty      30        manual mode

Press <enter> to keep the current choice[*], or type selection number: 3
update-alternatives: using /usr/bin/pinentry-tty to provide /usr/bin/pinentry (pinentry) in manual mode

I don’t use GNOME, or pinentry-gnome3. I use pinentry-tty, which I have specified in my configuration file .gnupg/gpg-agent.conf with the line pinentry-program /usr/bin/pinentry-tty, but for some reason, the package pinentry-gnome3 was installed on my system. I don’t know how that happened. Changing it to option 3, which was /usr/bin/pinentry-tty for me, finally solved my issue!