I’m having an issue where every so often (at seemingly random intervals, but I haven’t been able to measure) where the mouse will appear to not respond for a very brief period and will then suddenly catch up with itself. It’s most noticeable when I’m scrolling through a long article as it’ll not scroll immediately and will then suddenly scroll several lines at once.
I’ve noticed the same issue is affecting the keyboard. Sometimes when I press a key it doesn’t appear straight away, and will then catch up after a brief period (fraction of a second) or type multiples of the same character. In the worst instance, when pressing backspace to delete a single character, it’ll stutter and then delete a word or two instead.
For context, I’m using 6.0.11-arch1-1 for the kernel with KDE Plasma (5.26.4). I’m also using nvidia with prime (on X11) which I installed using the nvidia-inst package/script.
Has anyone else experienced this problem? Any idea how to fix it?
I have the same issue with the keyboard and it was supper annoying, I could not type as I was not sure if it is going to register or not. After a while I figured out if I go to Accessibility and toggle ‘sticky keys’ on and off on time it goes away. No idea why and how. I am using Xfce DE btw.
No, nothing. I’ve been running it for the last 30 minutes and haven’t had any errors other than one about a “missing plasmoid for plasma”, but I don’t think that’s related to this issue.
If it was only with a bluetooth mouse, I would suspect connectivity issues.
If it was only with a cable keyboard, I would suspect the terminal font is not Monospace.
Since it happens on both the above, I suggest checking for excessive CPU/RAM usage, with some system task manager (htop, etc.).
A little more digging showed that it seemed to coincide with my nvidia card changing its clock speeds because of power management etc. The powermizer preferred mode was originally set to Adaptive, so I tried changing it to Prefer Maximum Performance to see if that would have any effect.
After a few minutes of running with this setting changed, I still hadn’t seen any freezing of the mouse (I moved it around constantly during this period), so decided to make the change permanent by adding:
to the xorg.conf file located at /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-nvidia.conf (I believe this was created by the nvidia-inst script), and then rebooted.
This seems to have done the trick, but obviously at the expense of increase power consumption, which is not ideal. The other alternative, and probably the reason I didn’t have this problem on my previous insert other distro’s name installation on the same laptop, is to disable the nvidia card and use only the integrated card. I may still do that as the nvidia card is obviously going to be hotter now and use more power.
In a normal Optimus setup, iGPU is the main GPU to handle all applications, except for the power demanding apps, where either automatically, or manually, the tasks are send to dGPU/nvidia for rendering.
In the case of keyboard and mouse, they should normally being driven by your iGPU/Intel.
If this is not happening, then something must be wrong, either a misconfiguration, or a bug. (at least AFAIK).
Why don’t you post your Xorg log, when the issue is happening? (use a paste-bin web service)
I used the Optimus Switch method described at https://discovery.endeavouros.com/nvidia/optimus-switch-another-solution-for-optimus-laptops/2021/04/, which only seems to allow me to choose Intel (Nvidia powered down) or Nvidia, but not the hybrid mode I’ve seen in other methods (eg. Optimus Manager). I’m actually quite happy using the Nvidia card for all rendering as when I plug my monitors into my laptop it’ll use the Nvidia card anyway as that’s what the display ports are attached to.
