Fedora 39 very slow and laggish

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1

I installed Fedora 39 KDE spin on my work Lenovo ThinkPad T15 laptop about six months ago. I also installed i3wm and everything worked smoothly until some time ago after a kernel update. I now have Linux kernel 6.8.11-200 and at least since kernel 6.8.9 the machine has been very slow, borderline unusable. I have tried with i3wm using X11 and Plasma Wayland. Everything works fine for the first few minutes but then things start to slow down and it becomes very laggy. The CPU or memory usages are never at 100%.

This has happened before after a kernel update, but things started working fine after a new kernel was released. Now this has been ongoing for the last several kernels and I don’t know if I have to switch my OS. Not sure if relevant, but for the last kernel updates the machine booted to black screen after login screen and I had to reinstall the nvidia drivers.

I don’t even know how to start to approach this problem or what information would be helpful for others to diagnose the issue. Any help is appreciated as I would hate to switch the OS.

2

The first thing I would do is check the system journal for errors:

journalctl -r

Or try GNOME Logs if you want a graphical application.

I got lots of freezes on GNOME with NVIDIA and needed to switch back to Plasma; there were logs that accompanied the freezes.

3

You may want to upgrade to f40 that has plasma 6 that has a lot of improvements.

Do you have nvidia GPU? If so which driver are you using? rpmfusion is recommended.

4

Thanks for the help. Nothing unusual can be found from journalctl. I also updated to Fedora 40 but problem persists. One thing I noticed from nvidia-settings is that GPU utilization is always at 0%. The laptop has integrated GPU and a dedicated GPU. Can this be related to the problem and why would it have been working on older kernel versions?