I’ve been trying out EndeavourOS (KDE plasma X11) and everything seems to be working nicely except for one thing. There is a 2-3 second loading time when opening programs. This happens with all programs, even konsole, dolphin and other lighter programs that should be instant. Opening the system settings actually takes 3-4 seconds. Once the program is open everything works fine. Moving, minimizing, maximizing and so on is instant. No reduced performance in games from what I can tell.
I’ve used journalctl -f to see if there are any interesting logs, but found nothing when opening konsole or system settings for example.
I’ve been searching around for a fix but haven’t found anything definitive yet. A lot of people suggest that xdg-desktop-portal-gnome is causing issues, but I don’t have that package installed. Disabling the compositor did help and brought the load time down to about 1 second, but it’s not perfect. There is still a noticeable delay.
Is this an Nvidia + X11 thing? Do I just have to deal with it? Before you suggest Wayland, I need X11 for certain programs to run.
EndeavourOS is installed on a nvme Samsung 980 pro 1TB.
Using Nvidia/X11 with Xfce here, never noticed lag of any kind opening programs. Well, there’s one exception - I have an external 4TB USB drive that powers off when not used, so any programs using it will lag until the device is ready.
Does the lag occur if you run a program, shut it down, then quickly run it again?
Yes, the lag is consistent even when quitting and starting in rapid succession. There is also no difference between starting a program right after a reboot or starting it for the nth time.
Not sure how you change between X11 and Wayland while running EOS Live ISO. Logging out doesn’t work as it just logs you in with the liveuser account again. XDG_SESSION_TYPE said TTY. Whatever type the Live ISO was running still had a delay, but maybe that’s to be expected since I was running it from a USB.
I tried swapping between X11 and Wayland again (not running the Live ISO) with my user and a brand new user, but the delay is still there. With the compositor on you can see the little loading icon next to the cursor while waiting.
This is why they need to stop making things faster.
I’m here with my pretty good device, Lenovo ThinkPad P71, and many of my apps, not including Nemo, Xed, GPicView, Geany, and xfce4-terminal take a minimum of 2-3 seconds to show the window, with an average of 3-5.
Yet, I’m completely unbothered by this.
Anyway, I guess once people get used to instant everything, there’s no going back.
PS: I just realised I named a bunch of Gtk-based apps. Maybe that’s the issue?
Dolphin does take about 7-10 seconds on first launch for me, and I have tested it with opening just the home folder and opening it with several tabs — makes no difference. Subsequent launches vary from 0-4 seconds, usually depending on which other apps I already have opened.
The easiest way to test this theory is to time the execution in a shell. Try to open a terminal, then use “time” as a prefix to any command you also start using the GUI.
As a next step (and this can be a little overwhelming) you can use “strace” as a prefix, which shows which binary functions are called by the executable and when, and how long the call takes. From there you might get a pretty good idea where the time is spent during the start.
strace -r was interesting, but I couldn’t really pinpoint anything useful. Couldn’t find any function call that was much slower than the others.
I tried installing EOS with KDE Plasma on a virtual machine and still had ~2s loading times (with compositor on). However, EOS with cinnamon (X11) did not.
Maybe my expectations are off. I prefer KDE over cinnamon and as long as the compositor is off I can live with the delay. Just thought I would ask here in case it was a known issue.
As I wrote here, putting a HDD in the computer brings the time back. On my ThinkPad x220 from 2011, with an i5, 8GB Ram and an old SanDisk SSD, the computer starts in a few seconds, applications launch immediately under plasma6 (with most bling-bling-beep-animation deactivated), so there is no time for me, everybody wants answers and solutions NOW. Thanks for the slow internet connection where I live
Maybe when the machines become faster than the speed of light it’s time to buy new hardware. I don’t think that will happen in my lifetime, but who knows
Well with newer hardware if the application doesn’t open with the snap of a finger. Then to me it’s not acceptable. I get annoyed if it takes 2 snaps of the finger.
Oh man. Dont remind me of memory management. 20 years ago I was trying to teach myself assembly language. It was going pretty bad. I understood little about it, but when I got to memory management it went from bad to mind blowing. Who thinks of that stuff?
Yer a lot of it goes over my head too. I found this by looking at the wiki and checking the other sources, still have to read through it properly as I’m a bit busy but hopefully you can make some sense out of it
