1y ago

Plasma 6 (Wayland) is laggy on my laptop running on 6th gen i5

discuss.kde.org

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.

14 comments

I have a big gaming desktop and at first it felt kinda slow, but then I found out it was happening because of the previous plasma 5 config messing with things, and the variable refresh rate affecting the mouse cursor movement.
- I discovered that the fan just died.
  Sorry for this. I didn't check that old laptop till yesterday to check for other issues unrelated to Plasma, which was when I discovered that the fan died.
  It's a spare laptop a friend gave to me recently.

I'm running Plasma 5 on my i5 5200U on iGPU on X11 and it's pretty much stable and solid (it's not riced a lot though), isn't Plasma 6 still pre-release?
- It is. I was merely curious if it's normal at this point in time.
- This is completely unrelated
- I discovered that the fan just died.
  Sorry for this. I didn't check that old laptop till yesterday to check for other issues unrelated to Plasma, which was when I discovered that the fan died.
  It's a spare laptop a friend gave to me recently.

Try creating a new user profile as another commenter said it might be plasma 5 configs messing with Plasma 6.
This would be another bug though
- I discovered that the fan just died.
  Sorry for this. I didn't check that old laptop till yesterday to check for other issues unrelated to Plasma, which was when I discovered that the fan died.
  It's a spare laptop a friend gave to me recently.
  
  Water cooling!

- 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.
- 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
  
  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.

14 comments