Issues after Plasma 6.6 update

Hello!

I updated from Plasma 6.5 to 6.6 yesterday and the system became sluggish (lag between mouse click and actions) when interacting with certain applications, e.g., system settings, lock screen (but not initial login screen), spectacle.

When interacting with them I see a significantly higher memory consumption and CPU spikes. Using a browser, the terminal or even an electron app shows no such issues though.

I didn’t see anything relevant in journalctl /usr/bin/plasmashell, so I tried to revert from Plasma 6.6 to 6.5 using eos-shifttime. After the reboot, the issues were gone. When I tried upgrading to Plasma 6.6 (pacman -S plasma) from that state and rebooting, the issues were back.

I’m unsure of what the actual issue is or how to debug this properly. Any ideas are welcome!

inxi -FAZ --no-host

Welcome to the forum!

Just to make sure, have you tried command

sudo pacman -Syu

Simple sudo pacman -S plasma will not install any updates.

Hey, thanks!

I used kinfo after every change and reboot to make sure which Plasma version was installed.

Note that

sudo pacman -Syu

installs updates for all packages (if there are any), not just plasma packages.

After the revert with eos-shifttime, a full update (pacman -Syu) indeed shows that it will update more than just the plasma packages.

But if I just run pacman -S plasma, I get:

Summary
: There are 67 members in group plasma:
:: Repository extra
   1) aurorae  2) bluedevil  3) breeze  4) breeze-cursors  5) breeze-gtk  6) breeze-plymouth  7) discover  8) drkonqi  9) flatpak-kcm  10) kactivitymanagerd  11) kde-cli-tools  12) kde-gtk-config
   13) kdecoration  14) kdeplasma-addons  15) kgamma  16) kglobalacceld  17) kinfocenter  18) kmenuedit  19) knighttime  20) kpipewire  21) krdp  22) kscreen  23) kscreenlocker  24) ksshaskpass
   25) ksystemstats  26) kwallet-pam  27) kwayland  28) kwin  29) kwin-x11  30) kwrited  31) layer-shell-qt  32) libkscreen  33) libksysguard  34) libplasma  35) milou  36) ocean-sound-theme  37) oxygen
   38) oxygen-sounds  39) plasma-activities  40) plasma-activities-stats  41) plasma-browser-integration  42) plasma-desktop  43) plasma-disks  44) plasma-firewall  45) plasma-integration  46) plasma-keyboard
   47) plasma-login-manager  48) plasma-nm  49) plasma-pa  50) plasma-sdk  51) plasma-systemmonitor  52) plasma-thunderbolt  53) plasma-vault  54) plasma-welcome  55) plasma-workspace
   56) plasma-workspace-wallpapers  57) plasma5support  58) plymouth-kcm  59) polkit-kde-agent  60) powerdevil  61) print-manager  62) qqc2-breeze-style  63) sddm-kcm  64) spectacle  65) systemsettings
   66) wacomtablet  67) xdg-desktop-portal-kde

Enter a selection (default=all): 
warning: breeze-cursors-6.6.0-2 is up to date -- reinstalling
warning: plasma-login-manager-6.6.0-1 is up to date -- reinstalling
resolving dependencies...
looking for conflicting packages...

Package (67)                       Old Version  New Version  Net Change

extra/aurorae                      6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.13 MiB
extra/bluedevil                    1:6.5.5-1    1:6.6.0-1      0.27 MiB
extra/breeze                       6.5.5-1      6.6.0-2      -28.63 MiB
extra/breeze-cursors               6.6.0-2      6.6.0-2        0.00 MiB
extra/breeze-gtk                   6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.00 MiB
extra/breeze-plymouth              6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.00 MiB
extra/discover                     6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.20 MiB
extra/drkonqi                      6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.10 MiB
extra/flatpak-kcm                  6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.01 MiB
extra/kactivitymanagerd            6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.00 MiB
extra/kde-cli-tools                6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.00 MiB
extra/kde-gtk-config               6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.00 MiB
extra/kdecoration                  6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.02 MiB
extra/kdeplasma-addons             6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        1.83 MiB
extra/kgamma                       6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.00 MiB
extra/kglobalacceld                6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.01 MiB
extra/kinfocenter                  6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.05 MiB
extra/kmenuedit                    6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.00 MiB
extra/knighttime                   6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.00 MiB
extra/kpipewire                    6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.11 MiB
extra/krdp                         6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.01 MiB
extra/kscreen                      6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.13 MiB
extra/kscreenlocker                6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.00 MiB
extra/ksshaskpass                  6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.01 MiB
extra/ksystemstats                 6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.00 MiB
extra/kwallet-pam                  6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.00 MiB
extra/kwayland                     6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.00 MiB
extra/kwin                         6.5.5-3      6.6.0-1        0.49 MiB
extra/kwin-x11                     6.5.5-2      6.6.0-1        0.20 MiB
extra/kwrited                      6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.00 MiB
extra/layer-shell-qt               6.5.5-2      6.6.0-1        0.00 MiB
extra/libkscreen                   6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.11 MiB
extra/libksysguard                 6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.02 MiB
extra/libplasma                    6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.10 MiB
extra/milou                        6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.05 MiB
extra/ocean-sound-theme            6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.00 MiB
extra/oxygen                       6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.00 MiB
extra/oxygen-sounds                6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.00 MiB
extra/plasma-activities            6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.00 MiB
extra/plasma-activities-stats      6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.00 MiB
extra/plasma-browser-integration   6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.00 MiB
extra/plasma-desktop               6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        2.52 MiB
extra/plasma-disks                 6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.01 MiB
extra/plasma-firewall              6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.00 MiB
extra/plasma-integration           6.5.5-2      6.6.0-1        0.01 MiB
extra/plasma-keyboard              0.1.0-1      6.6.0-1        0.13 MiB
extra/plasma-login-manager         6.6.0-1      6.6.0-1        0.00 MiB
extra/plasma-nm                    6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.18 MiB
extra/plasma-pa                    6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.02 MiB
extra/plasma-sdk                   6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.02 MiB
extra/plasma-systemmonitor         6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.16 MiB
extra/plasma-thunderbolt           6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.01 MiB
extra/plasma-vault                 6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1       -0.03 MiB
extra/plasma-welcome               6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1       -0.02 MiB
extra/plasma-workspace             6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.49 MiB
extra/plasma-workspace-wallpapers  6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1       37.66 MiB
extra/plasma5support               6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.15 MiB
extra/plymouth-kcm                 6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.00 MiB
extra/polkit-kde-agent             6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.00 MiB
extra/powerdevil                   6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1       -0.02 MiB
extra/print-manager                1:6.5.5-1    1:6.6.0-1      0.02 MiB
extra/qqc2-breeze-style            6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.12 MiB
extra/sddm-kcm                     6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.01 MiB
extra/spectacle                    1:6.5.5-1    1:6.6.0-1     -0.37 MiB
extra/systemsettings               6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.00 MiB
extra/wacomtablet                  6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.00 MiB
extra/xdg-desktop-portal-kde       6.5.5-1      6.6.0-1        0.20 MiB

Total Installed Size:  583.68 MiB
Net Upgrade Size:       16.50 MiB

If I just run that command and then run kinfo, I get:

Summary
Operating System: EndeavourOS 
KDE Plasma Version: 6.6.0
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.23.0
Qt Version: 6.10.2
Kernel Version: 6.18.9-arch1-2 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 8 × Intel® Core™ i5-8350U CPU @ 1.70GHz
Memory: 8 GiB of RAM (7.6 GiB usable)
Graphics Processor: Intel® UHD Graphics 620

After a reboot, I then experience the slowness issues again.

Are you trying to identify if the issue is just related to plasma or another package that may have been updated?

As a point of fact, partial upgrades aren’t supported by Arch, it should always be ALL or nothing.

3 Likes

Partial updates are not supported by Arch based systems because it may/will lead to problems.
That’s why pacman with -Syu is sensible, especially if the system is in the state of partial updates.

Understood.

The system was fully updated when I had these issues. The reverts and partial upgrades were just to try to isolate what component of the full upgrade was responsible.

Returning the system to the fully upgraded status (pacman -Syu) shows the issues I mentioned at the start of the thread.

Digging a bit further in the logs, I did find some messages that pop up when interactions are very slow, namely:

systemsettings[3774]: warning: queue 0x5593c3775600 destroyed while proxies still attached:
systemsettings[3774]:   wl_display#1 still attached

My take (limited as it is) is that those errors are meaningless, though that doesn’t mean a thing (good or bad) about your perceived slow down.

1 Like

Probably worth posting a full journalctl -b.

I’ve added it here, thanks for having a look!

In the meantime, I wanted to check if this was Wayland related and installed plasma-x11-session (as per No X11 option on SDDM - #8 by marteng69 )

Rebooting and logging in with a x11 session did not trigger any of the issues.

Alas nothing stands out for me. But that journal also seems awfully short?

PS: I updated a i5-8250U laptop with an iGPU this morning. Everything seems fine.

As the original poster stated, there appears to be a memory issue within the Plasma 6.6 update. I have reverted back to 6.5 and will wait for someone to discover why it is happening.

Using two browsers open with many tabs present, my computer locks up and stops responding to mouse clicks. I can move the cursor, I cannot click to perform any function without rebooting.

Hi, sorry for entering this discussion despite not being an EndeavourOS user. I have upgraded to Plasma 6.6 in the recent days on my Fedora 43 Laptop and I noticed the same various lags after the Plasma 6.6 update, limited to the desktop and not apps such as the Google Chrome browser. I am also encountering the same difference in the usability between Plasma 6.5 and 6.6 on the Arch installation I have on a external drive but I don’t have rollbacks enabled on that system so I cannot confirm the issue is there 100% but undoubtedly looks more laggy with 6.6 also on Arch. So this seems more a Plasma upstream issue than a Arch/EndeavourOS one.

1 Like

Hey Fede, good to have you with us. It may well be a Plasmashell memory leak, although it’s not been widely reported. Can you provide a little bit more info on your system?

inxi -Fzx

sure

System:
  Kernel: 6.19.3-200.vanilla.fc43.x86_64 arch: x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc
    v: 15.2.1
  Desktop: KDE Plasma v: 6.6.0 Distro: Fedora Linux 43 (KDE Plasma Desktop
    Edition)
Machine:
  Type: Laptop System: Micro-Star product: Modern 15 H AI C1MG v: REV:1.0
    serial: <superuser required>
  Mobo: Micro-Star model: MS-15H5 v: REV:1.0 serial: <superuser required>
    Firmware: UEFI vendor: American Megatrends LLC. v: E15H5IMS.110
    date: 05/15/2025
Battery:
  ID-1: BAT1 charge: 37.1 Wh (97.8%) condition: 37.9/37.8 Wh (100.3%)
    volts: 12.87 min: 11.4 model: MSI BIF0_9 status: not charging
CPU:
  Info: 14-core (4-mt/10-st) model: Intel Core Ultra 5 125H bits: 64
    type: MST AMCP arch: Meteor Lake rev: 4 cache: L1: 1.4 MiB L2: 14 MiB
    L3: 18 MiB
  Speed (MHz): avg: 400 min/max: 400/4500:3600:2500 cores: 1: 400 2: 400
    3: 400 4: 400 5: 400 6: 400 7: 400 8: 400 9: 400 10: 400 11: 400 12: 400
    13: 400 14: 400 15: 400 16: 400 17: 400 18: 400 bogomips: 107827
  Flags-basic: avx avx2 ht lm nx pae sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 ssse3 vmx
Graphics:
  Device-1: Intel Meteor Lake-P [Intel Arc Graphics] vendor: Micro-Star MSI
    driver: i915 v: kernel arch: Xe-LPG bus-ID: 00:02.0
  Device-2: Chicony HD Webcam driver: uvcvideo type: USB bus-ID: 3-9:3
  Display: wayland server: Xwayland v: 24.1.9 compositor: kwin_wayland
    driver: gpu: i915 resolution: 1920x1080~60Hz
  API: EGL v: 1.5 drivers: iris,swrast platforms:
    active: gbm,wayland,x11,surfaceless,device inactive: N/A
  API: OpenGL v: 4.6 compat-v: 4.5 vendor: intel mesa v: 25.3.5 glx-v: 1.4
    direct-render: yes renderer: Mesa Intel Arc Graphics (MTL)
  API: Vulkan v: 1.4.341 drivers: intel,llvmpipe surfaces: N/A devices: 2
  Info: Tools: api: clinfo, eglinfo, glxinfo, vulkaninfo
    de: kscreen-console,kscreen-doctor wl: wayland-info x11: xdriinfo,
    xdpyinfo, xprop, xrandr
Audio:
  Device-1: Intel Meteor Lake-P HD Audio vendor: Micro-Star MSI
    driver: sof-audio-pci-intel-mtl bus-ID: 00:1f.3
  API: ALSA v: k6.19.3-200.vanilla.fc43.x86_64 status: kernel-api
  Server-1: PipeWire v: 1.4.10 status: active
Network:
  Device-1: Intel Meteor Lake PCH CNVi WiFi driver: iwlwifi v: kernel
    bus-ID: 00:14.3
  IF: wlo1 state: up mac: <filter>
Bluetooth:
  Device-1: Intel AX211 Bluetooth driver: btusb v: 0.8 type: USB
    bus-ID: 3-10:4
  Report: rfkill ID: hci0 rfk-id: 0 state: up address: see --recommends
Drives:
  Local Storage: total: 584.85 GiB used: 34.41 GiB (5.9%)
  ID-1: /dev/mmcblk0 model: SR128 size: 119.08 GiB type: USB
  ID-2: /dev/nvme0n1 vendor: Crucial model: CT500P5PSSD8 size: 465.76 GiB
    temp: 30.9 C
Partition:
  ID-1: / size: 463.16 GiB used: 33.89 GiB (7.3%) fs: btrfs dev: /dev/dm-0
    mapped: luks-XXXXXXX
  ID-2: /boot size: 1.9 GiB used: 510.7 MiB (26.2%) fs: ext4
    dev: /dev/nvme0n1p2
  ID-3: /boot/efi size: 598.8 MiB used: 19.3 MiB (3.2%) fs: vfat
    dev: /dev/nvme0n1p1
  ID-4: /home size: 463.16 GiB used: 33.89 GiB (7.3%) fs: btrfs
    dev: /dev/dm-0 mapped: luks-XXXXXXX
Swap:
  ID-1: swap-1 type: zram size: 8 GiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%) dev: /dev/zram0
Sensors:
  System Temperatures: cpu: 35.0 C mobo: N/A
  Fan Speeds (rpm): cpu: 0 fan-2: 0 fan-3: 0 fan-4: 0
Info:
  Memory: total: 16 GiB available: 15.27 GiB used: 5.35 GiB (35.0%)
  Processes: 477 Uptime: 19h 40m Init: systemd
  Packages: 15 note: see --rpm Compilers: clang: 21.1.8 gcc: 15.2.1
    Shell: Bash v: 5.3.0 inxi: 3.3.40

Thanks, - there’s nothing obvious in your hardware specs or versioning that stands out. The first .x.1 patch is out this Tuesday for Plasma, if you can, hold out a few days, if you’re seeing the same issues in X11 as Wayland, it’s absolutely upstream.

2 Likes

6.61 is out now so maybe the update will help.

Hi, I’ve updated to 6.6.1 but the issue seem unfixed. I wanted to give a try to KDE Neon to see if the issue persists also there but unfortunately it ships Kernel 6.17 or 6.8 which both don’t work quite well on my laptop. Also, after booting Neon with some kernel command line shenanigans KDE Login screen crashed when entering password (which is, btw, identical to what happens on Kubuntu….). I know my setup is very hostile to the Linux environment but still KDE 6.5 seemed to be way more fluent and after 6.6 update there is some minor yet noticeable stuttering.

Edit: I also tried creating a new user to see if it was caused by some config file updated from 6.5 to 6.6 but the issue was present also there.

I have updated to the latest Plasma 6.6.1 from 6.5.5 and I also face some slow system. Shutdown button appears and disappears. Some apps which depended on Wayland also stopped reporting proper gpu vendor and now loads using Softpipe (they used to render with OpenGL or LLMVpipe = Vulkan). But the only thing that I downgraded that made my system go back to previous state was KWin, the rest of Plasma components seems to not be the cause.