I'm using EndeavourOS with KDE Plasma and experience very short freezes—roughly a quarter to half a second—when opening or closing certain application windows, especially the terminal. For example, if I move the mouse immediately after opening a window, the pointer briefly stops and then jumps ahead.
The same behavior occurs on several systems: a laptop with an RTX 3060 Mobile, a desktop with an RTX 4080 Super, and a ThinkPad using Intel integrated graphics. I previously improved sluggish scrolling during GPU power-state changes by increasing the minimum GPU clock, but that did not affect these window-opening freezes. I wondered whether NVIDIA GSP or the driver might be involved, although that would not explain the Intel system.
The issue appears under Wayland but not X11. The systems use KDE Plasma 6.7.4 and an Arch-based kernel. Is there a simple setting or configuration change that can eliminate this behavior?
3 Answers
The culprit was my window decoration theme. I was using Plastik, and switching to Breeze fixed the brief freezes under Wayland. Everything behaved normally under X11 even with Plastik, which made the cause less obvious.
There can also be driver-specific causes. For example, the nvidia-open 610 series has been reported to introduce performance regressions that can appear as short freezes. It’s worth checking the driver version if changing the window decoration does not help.
On at least one laptop using an RTX 3060 Mobile, KDE with the Breeze decorations did not show this behavior while using the open-source NVIDIA driver. That suggests the window decoration and driver combination may both matter, rather than GPU hardware alone.
Thanks for documenting this—switching to Breeze solved the same problem for me too.