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Plasma 6 Bugs

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Plasma 6 (Wayland) is laggy on my laptop running on 6th gen i5 (discuss.kde.org)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

14 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm not sure if this is normal, but it seems that Plasma 6 (Wayland) feels overall slow on my laptop with Intel i5-6200U.

Operating System: KDE neon Unstable Edition
KDE Plasma Version: 5.90.0
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.246.0
Qt Version: 6.6.0
Kernel Version: 6.2.0-37-generic (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 4 × Intel® Core™ i5-6200U CPU @ 2.30GHz
Memory: 15.5 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: Mesa Intel® HD Graphics 520
Manufacturer: Dell Inc.
Product Name: Inspiron 5559

I only got this laptop recently from a friend so I have yet to test on X11 session. The only other time I've spent using Plasma was on a RTX 3060 Ti in a VM so it didn't feel as slow.

Is that normal?

Created bug report 477959.

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[+] [email protected] -7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

The smallish memory and CPU usage difference between plasma 5 and xfce etc. isn't worth the drop in usability.

Plasma has seriously improved its performance over the years.

Now Plasma 6 might be a memory hog or just a mm early beta. No judging before it's out.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I've been running Plasma on my Intel Skylake I5-6?00U with 8gb RAM since 2015 and its utterly fine, no sluggishness in plasma itself. It's still using X11 though, on an old Kubuntu LTS.

Plasma isn't THAT heavy that it should be expected to feel sluggish on that kind of hardware. And contrary to popular belief Plasma isn't actually that heavy of a DE in terms of resources.

OP might need to try different compositor backends? I remember years ago testing each before settling on whatever gave me smoothest performance (maybe OpenGL3?). Actually I'm not sure if this is even a setting anymore in modern Plasma, or in Wayland

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I was merely testing out Plasma 6 on it, and I was just shocked on how sluggish it felt. I recently just got that laptop, so I'm hoping there isn't some BS where the performance gets hampered by the kind of charger i'm using.

I was just curious if that's what's happening at this point in time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Have you tried X11 yet?

( It should just be a matter of logging out, selecting X11 in the bottom righ corner, and logging in again)

Suffice to say, sluggish performance on your hardware shouldn't be expected, so something must be wrong.

In KDE System monitor you can try adding a new page to show CPU clock speed , to check if the Dell is not throttling. (Dell laptops throttling on the wrong charger is definitely a thing, but I've only experienced on more powerful laptops)

Since you installed pre-release software I assume you don't mind re-installing, so you could always try Neon Stable with 5.27, Kubuntu 23.10 or another distro entirely, to ensure your laptop is OK.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I didn't need to. I didn't boot it up till yesterday to look for other causes, which was when I realized the fan died.