@briantist Upgrading to the latest version went fine. I managed to install crossgen and it build a couple of native images, but that didn't seem to affect start-up time. I'm not sure I ran it on the proper files though.
@Dennis eh I figured, even on Windows the effect of pre-generating was (imo) hard to quantify, but worth a shot. FWIW, loading PowerShell console host on Windows suffers from similar startup delays.