I'm running EndeavourOS with KDE Plasma and see very short freezes—roughly a quarter to half a second—when opening or closing some application windows, especially the terminal. If I move the mouse while opening a window, the pointer briefly stops and then jumps ahead.
The 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 had previously reduced scrolling lag caused by the GPU starting from a low-power state by raising the minimum clock, but that did not resolve these window-opening freezes. I wondered whether NVIDIA GSP might be involved, although that would not explain the Intel system.
The issue appears under Wayland but not X11. Is there a straightforward KDE setting or configuration change that fixes it?
3 Answers
The culprit turned out to be the window decoration theme. I was using Plastik, and switching to Breeze fixed the brief freezes under Wayland. The same issue did not occur for me under X11. It’s a surprisingly old and easy-to-miss KDE configuration issue.
On at least one laptop using an RTX 3060 Mobile, Breeze decorations with the open-source NVIDIA driver did not show this effect. That suggests the decoration theme and compositor path may matter more than the GPU model itself.
There may also be a driver-related version of this problem. Some users have reported short freezes with the nvidia-open 610 driver series, described as a performance regression. If changing the window decoration does not help, testing another NVIDIA driver version could be worthwhile.
Thanks for sharing the fix—this should be useful for anyone seeing the same behavior.