Arch Linux

hermes.hariwald

Member

From: Hungary

Registered: 2024-12-11

Posts: 1

Both GNOME and Cinnamon starts dropping FPS by seemingly random events

Hey!

(It's a difficult problem to describe it best as I am unfamiliar with the technical details of the inner workings of graphics and desktop environments in Linux as I always used Ubuntu or Fedora prior to Arch that spared me from having to understand them, but since I shifted to Arch, it seems my limited knowledge about it is going to stop me from properly using Arch so here I am, trying to submerge into this topic and try to figure out what the problem is, because right now, I'm at a loss so much that I don't even know how to start troublehsooting.)

The problem:
Pretty much randomly both GNOME and Cinnamon starts lagging/dropping frames that makes the desktop experience seem like I'm using a 20Hz monitor.
I don't know what event exactly triggers this issue: sometimes it's coming back from the lock screen, sometimes it's switching the workspace, sometimes hitting Super to 'bring up' the overlay.

The workaround:
The only way to get out of this state is logging out and in. (Or executing 'r' in the Run Command window in Cinnamon using the Alt + F2. IDK, if that's the case in GNOME, have not tried it yet.)

What constellations triggered the issue:
* GNOME 47 on Wayland
* GNOME 47 on X11
* Cinnamon 6.4 on X11
(Couldn't try Cinnamon on Wayland as that config crashes right away, so that seemed to me a completely different rabbit hole to get into.)
I'm executing pacman -Syu regularily, so I'm up to date.

(An other way I tried to solve the problem is by completely leaving behind both Cinnamon and GNOME in favor of KDE Plasma but that one crashed also right away, and I no longer had the patience for rabbit hole #3.)

My goal with this:
The reason I'm using Arch is to understand Linux more. That includes the graphical stack involved in creating these fancy DE's, but right now I don't even know how to even start honing in on this issue as it's such an unkown territory for me.

What logs and where should I look at? What tools are there to see where things can be observed that give clues what causes this random 'I'm rendering myself in 20fps from now on, boy!' mode?