Distro: openSuse Tumbleweed
Kde 6.3.5
Hello, need help diagnosing issue that popped up today on my desktop (right after launching computer first time after it working yesterday just fine).
Suddenly plasma desktop became unresponsive taking ages (minutes) to show context menu, react to any clicks, either in context menus or on panel etc.
However using krunner (alt+F2) remained responsive, as were applications launched through it. Doing clean login did not help.
I was able to “fix” the issue by deleting “.config/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc”, however after recreating my desktop, the issue popped up again.
After many tries and config deletions (at one point i deleted everything in .config directory that starts with word “plasma” :P) I was able to pinpoint the issue to simply having two instances of application launcher widgets, each on separate panel on one of my monitors.
After further testing, however I excluded the panels, or even two monitors, from the cause, but narrowed it down to widget itself, as simply act of dropping two instances of launcher widget on same desktop(monitor), with all panels removed, also cause the insane slowdown.
Managing (with massive issues due to several minute lag on each action) to remove second widget will not help immediately, only after logging out and in again (witch also takes ages with the issue).
Issue manifests on both wayland and x11 sessions.
What is even weirder that combination of application launcher and application menu widgets work fine, even two application menu widgets are ok, only application launcher causes the slowdown.
I’m asking for help to diagnose the issue further (which config file can be borked, or what could be causing the issue), as this behavior popped up just today, with desktop being perfectly usable yesterday, even with two panels, having two application launchers each.
this is a good case study in why timeshift should be one of the first software to be installed.
no peace of mind better than having an issue like this crop up and knowing you can just roll back to yesterday’s snapshot where everything was working.
that said, you can try and diagnose this by brute force if you are sure it’s just your user and cannot be reproduced on a new user profile.
# brute force troubleshooting...
mv ~/.config ~/.configBORKED
# logout and log back in again to force plasma to recreate the folder with default settings
dolphin --split ~/.config ~/.configBORKED
# copy back half of the BORKED folder contents at a time and relog to see if issue returns
# if it does, then delete the folder again, relog, and only copy half of that previous half
# repeat until the culprit is found, then finally, copy back everything BUT that culprit bit
You might try disabling any search plugins you don’t use, among others, to see if one of those is causing this. Though I think these are shared with krunner, and that is working fine for you.
This is the stock Application Launcher, and not one of the many alternative third-party options, I assume?
But it really may help to see what your last set of updates provided, maybe.
I can’t reproduce it here on my Plasma 6.3.5 setups here (KDE neon) with two Application Launchers on two different panels, one on each monitor, as a test.
Yep, it is stock application launcher, and I also cannot reproduce the issue on another computer, with the same distribution, same libraries and simmilar two monitor setup (my work laptop/work setup instead of my home PC where the issue occured).
That is why I asked for help what to look for, as my knowledge of KDE internals is currently non-existent, plus not being able to replicate the issue makes filing a bug a no-go. Just to add more information, when the plasma is in that super-laggy mode, the cpu is idling on all cores :/, it look like some sort of I/O or async issue, i would expect some recursive or self-referential issue to tax the computer more…
Interesting.
Looks like I might be hit by the same problem. See here.
So the first challenge is to find out which process is the application launcher, and to investigate whether the issue persists after making sure that it has been deleted from the system, as I do not need it. Will investigate and report back.
I’m not sure it can be similar issue to Yours, as my applications, including konsole, work fine and are responsive, only plasma itself becomes laggy because of the duplicate applicatin launcher widgets