In more frustrating news, I did something to my primary laptop, and now it crawls along like a 2005 Celeron trying to run Windows Vista.

My laptop is nothing too special (a Lenovo powered by an i7-1255U (4+8) @ 4.70 GHz with integrated “Iris Xe” graphics), but I’ve been running Manjaro Linux (with KDE Plasma) on it for the past couple of years, and apart from the odd pamac / pacman / “Add Remove Software” inconsistency (or Plasma widget issue), it’s been running pretty well.

Then, a few days ago, it started bugging about updates, and yesterday it added complaints about an unsupported kernel, so I finally pulled the trigger on it, and boy do I regret it.

I initially kept having issues downloading all of the updates (it was trying to download some kind of non-existent Quake-related library, which I had to remove), and I also had issues getting rid of the unsupported 7.1 kernel (due to some “meta” packages that had been installed), but in the end, I resolved both issues, got the kernel removed and the updates installed, and everything seemed fine after the post-update reboot… for about 10 minutes.

And that’s when the machine just decided to start moving at 1/3 speed: typing, moving the cursor, changing windows - everything started acting like it was 2008.

When I first tried to diagnose it, top showed kwin_wayland eating 50% of the CPU, and plasmashell another 10%, but it wasn’t consistent (they both came and went). I disabled all of the desktop effects, which helped some, as did blanking my plasma config (setting my desktop back to default), but things are still noticeably laggier than they were a few days ago.

Someone online suggested freeing up 25% space total on my root drive (which typically runs 90-95% full), so I’ve been cleaning up (and offloading) as much as I can. If that doesn’t work and I don’t find a solution by the end of the week, I’ll probably have to backup my data, wipe the machine clean, and start fresh. 🙃