Alright, so right from system start if I go in top, gnome-shell is taking up a bunch of resources. It chills as soon as there's no activity, but simply moving the mouse makes it consume up to 25% cpu. I'm not worried about that however, it's a 1000Hz mouse and I'm expecting some load on the system at those refresh rates.
Top screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/OOmB3yj.jpg

Taking gnome shell PID and running strace -C -p XXXX shows a bunch of errors related to recvmsg(), thousands per second.
Strace screenshot, 3 seconds at most: https://i.imgur.com/xhzRrWc.jpg

Running lsof -p XXXX to see what those 19 & 5 file descriptors are in the errors, they are both unix sockets, it's like gnome-shell is looking for a resource there and can't find it.
lsof screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/wwElBBR.jpg

This is as much as I was able to gather, can someone please help me find the source of these errors?
In another forum a user said they were able to resolve these by changing their user home directory. When I run the usermod command however, I get an error saying systemd is running & not allowing me to complete the change. I suspect it's preload or the profile-sync-daemon, but I haven't found the courage to turn them off and make the change - I'm affraid it will break something

Thanks!

To clear things up. Did you checksum your iso download before install? I run a systemd free distro so not much help on this as well as I run a window manager instead of gnome shell.

I mention the checksum because of

I haven't.. that's one thing I haven't thought of, but I'm also thinking - if it were the case, wouldn't setup throw an error?

If a file is missing or corrupted while the installer is installing files?

Is that what you mean by warning?

Nope. Never seen that. You realize you are asking the installer to checksum each and every file during the install file loading process.

Yeah maybe I should have checked the iso file.. will remember to do so in the future, I'm thinking of switching to Manjaro anyway. Heard it's among the best, Arch functionality with a GUI for noobs like me.