Fans are going constantly after switch to KDE. Lenovo Legion 7 Gen 10.

themusicalduck · 2026-02-22 18:39:44

I was recently having enough issues with Gnome on this laptop that I'm making a best attempt to switch to KDE.

So far it is overall working better and more smoothly than Gnome did on the hybrid setup, but one thing is annoying me quite a lot.

When I used Gnome the laptop fans were probably 50% silent and 50% of the time spinning only a little bit.

Since switching to KDE the fans are going all of the time and at quite a high speed (but not the max speed).

The only thing I notice in htop is baloo_file_extractor using up a fair amount of CPU (60-80% most of the time). If I do baloctl6 suspend it does seem to help. The fans slow down, but they still don't go silent like they used to on Gnome. Besides, I would like to be able to keep that service running so that I can search for files in Dolphin occasionally.

I don't see anything else sticking out using high CPU apart from baloo_file_extractor.

If I set the power mode to power saving, the fans also slow down a bit, but they still aren't silent. Generally I keep it set to balanced.

nvtop also doesn't show anything out of the ordinary. I can see that the integrated AMD GPU is doing all of the work and utilisation hovers around 10% with occasional spikes to 100%.

In the BIOS as well, I have the setting for "silent" balanced mode on.

Is there anything I can do to try and quieten down the fans? I was so happy when I got this laptop that it was silent most of the time, but I seem to have lost that benefit since switching to KDE.

The laptop is a Lenovo Legion Pro 7 Gen 10 with Nvidia 5080 and Ryzen 9 9955HX3D.

Thanks.

Last edited by themusicalduck (2026-02-22 18:41:21)

seth · 2026-02-22 21:11:10

I don't see anything else sticking out using high CPU apart from baloo_file_extractor.

That's KDE's spyware file indexer (gnome has something similar)
It'll typically charge the system for a while but eventually should™ settle down when it has found all references to the epstein files built the database

I don't see anything else sticking out using high CPU apart from baloo_file_extractor … nvtop also doesn't show anything out of the ordinary

The fans will kick in because the system is too hot and that heat comes out of your battery.
If the power draw isn't higher than on gnome this might be driven by the base temperature (residual heat from baloo) - otherwise, does the CPU clock down?
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/CPU_fr … ng_drivers

Arch Linux

#1 2026-02-22 18:39:44

Fans are going constantly after switch to KDE. Lenovo Legion 7 Gen 10.

#2 2026-02-22 21:11:10

Re: Fans are going constantly after switch to KDE. Lenovo Legion 7 Gen 10.

Board footer