@Russelli My spacemacs isnt super fast to load, maybe about 5 seconds. Still faster than what you expiernced.

And yes you actually can use both, all my projects do. In your repository go to the repository settings and there is a mirror option. You can choose to have gitlab as your main repo and mirror changes into a github repo as commits come in automatically. You can also do the reverse and mirror github into gitlab and make github your main repo.

Technically you can have it be bidirectional as well with any commit on either side mirroring to the other by setting up both, this is what I do.. But it can in some cases (particularly on very active repos) cause conflicts where the repos become out of sync. If you select "Keep divergent refs" it will help mitigate this partially by keeping the branches in sync that it can even if one branch gets out of sync. But use bidirectional mirroring with caution, it has never caused a conflict for me yet but it can and you should be mindful of that.