Hello everyone! After moving my laptop to Arch I decided that it was too much work to make it run 100% and even mantain in doing so. That’s why I decided to move to Kubuntu 21.10. It installed in 5 minutes without any iccups.
But I’ve noticed something strange: while using Arch the laptop was much quieter and the fan rarely spun up while doing general OS work. Kubuntu, on the other hand, feels like it’s making the laptop run much hotter than Arch (no temps measurements yet) and the fan is constantly spinning at higher RPMs.
What could that possibly be the cause of that behaviour? I didn’t do much beside installing and updating the OS, that’s it. I figured it would be a bit heavier on reasources, but it feels like it’s worse than Windows 10 regarding CPU usage.
Are you doing much file writing/moving about? If so my guess is it’s the file indexer of KDE Baloo. Seen it peg one of my cores at 100% while downloading files to my system as well as writing a rather absurd amount of data. So you may want to check KSysGuard/System Monitor and see if that is the case. If that is what’s going on then I would recommend disabling file indexing.
If you could be a little more specific on what you’re doing when you mean “general OS work” it may be easier to narrow it down, but so far it’s rather vague. KDE is actually pretty light on system usage in my experience outside of Baloo.
I did, but nothing looks out of the ordinary. The machine is kinda idling between 0% and 3% CPU usage with peaks of 5%.
Going through the settings, changing up themes, making empty folders to accomodate files for the future. Laying the ground for usage, that’s it. Not installing new apps or browsing the web in the meantime. But I’m connected to the internet at all times (duh).
I remember reading about it now that you mention it!
Huh weird I wouldn’t expect the fan to be revving up much with that kind of load. See you haven’t yet gotten temp measurements up and running makes me wonder if it’s more a driver issue of some kind. In that for some reason it’s causing the fans to run at a higher RPM than they normally would for the same temp. Possibly some performance mode type thing, but I am not sure since I am not much of a laptop user. Guess it could be misreading the temps as well, but doubtful on that.
It might be worth checking what processes running. KDE has a component called “baloo” to support semantic file search, and it doesn’t like me. For me, on my desktop it has always failed, sometimes burning CPU, sometimes burning a hole in my storage by continuously writing at 60 MB/s, sometimes filling up storage. And, I don’t like it; it’s designed to be opaque. So I disable it.
On my work laptop, about 4 years old, Kubuntu runs more snappily than Windows 10 did, but that may not be a fair comparison because Windows was overdue for a reinstall, as the previous user of it messed around installing lots of software.
Ouch ya I’ve seen mine hit in the 130 MB/s. The search is quite snappy due to it so I haven’t disabled it, but at the same time I am concerned for my drives endurance.
@Velgen I really can’t tell if there’s something wrong with the drivers or not. Performance settings are also not part of KDE or Kubuntu, so it’s not anything like that. The only thing I did is set the Nvidia GPU to powersaving mode through the drivers, that’s it.
@jlittle No baloo process running as “baloo” on my machine.
Also just wanted to note that it starts in 5 seconds flat from off and resumes from sleep like a Mac. I don’t know what’s the deal with fan speeds.
How would I go about reading CPU temps? Is there any way to do it without any software?
Something I just remembered you can configure it to only index file names if you want rather than completely disable it. The thing that takes up so much resources is the fact it indexes a bunch of other data about the files BESIDES the name. Here is the link to the KDE wiki on it.
Can’t do it, there’s no file related to Baloo settings in the folders mentioned by the devs. Checked the settings and file indexing is disabled all together and I didn’t do anything beforehand to it.
That was more for @jlittle since I find no file indexing whatsoever to be annoying if you need to make use of search much. Sadly I don’t think your issue is related to Baloo unfortunately. Think it’s something more related to the hardware not being sensed/handled properly.
Would recommend installing the package lm-sensors , then run sudo sensors-detect to configure it, and then ‘sensors’ to check your temps. Can also do ‘watch sensors’ for it to update live. Can also download a GUI utility if you want.
Did that in the mean time. It’s around 20°C in my room at the moment and hte CPU it’s idling at 42°C on the first three cores and 32°C on the forth. It’s an i7 3630QM, going on 9 years soon since I got it.
Battery is also going down much quicker than when I installed Arch.
P.S. the PC is doing nothing at all, only the shell is open and nothing else. From time to time I launch sensors to check on temps.
Those seem like pretty normal idle temps for a laptop honestly. Maybe a few C higher than it should be if new at that ambient, but considering it’s 9 years old sounds about right.
Could just be Kubuntu/Ubuntu having worse power management for some reason. Does it have a dGPU as well? If so my guess is it’s making use of the dGPU rather than the iGPU making it consume more power and run hotter/louder.
Yes. But I managed to get the dGPU working under Arch aswell and I did set it to power saving mode through the Nvidia control panel right now so it’s running basically on the iGPU alone.
Having issue with Pop OS trying to configure dual boot with Win10 using 2 separate sata SSDs. Didn’t realize until after the fact that Pop uses systemd bootloader over the traditional grub for most distributions. Gparted shows all drives still have data so no data loss has occured at this point. I have tried following a guide here to no avail Link Not a big deal right now because I don’t WFH and really just web browse on my PC more than anything but I do have games on the Win10 side that I would like to start playing again. Any help appreciated
I just tried Ubuntu 21.10 Wayland on my laptop and the touchpad is having a very annoying input lag. It makes me sick.
I rebooted into Windows and the input lag still remained there as well. I thought that it might have fucked up the firmware but luckily it was gone (from Windows at least) after a couple of reboots.
If they are on the same drive it normally should auto detect it are they on the same drive or separate drives? You should just be able to use the motherboard’s boot menu to select your Window’s install/drive and boot that way I believe.
Weird because that is exactly how I do it on my system which has the two installs on separate drives. Think my Windows install is even a legacy boot one.
Do you have other drives in your system besides the 2 drives that have the OSs on them? Have seen Windows put it’s bootloader on one of the storage drives in my PCs after some updates before and selecting the drive that had Windows installed on it from the motherboard boot menu would result in it failing to boot. Would have to select the storage drive that Windows had randomly moved the bootloader to be able to boot into Windows.
Edit because I thought of this later:
Have had Windows move the bootloader to my storage or other OS drives probably 5-10+ times now. Had one time where it somehow managed to swap the GRUB bootloader over to it’s drive and put it’s bootloader on the Linux drive. Which I still have no idea how that happened. So ya it’s not uncommon for Windows to move the bootloader in my experience.
Honestly though systemd-boot doesn’t do anything with the other bootloaders like say GRUB does. It’s very simple in that it only handles booting for it’s own install/drive really. Meaning that it shouldn’t mess up your Windows bootloader. Which makes me wonder if your bootloader for Windows had somehow gotten on another drive before this Pop!_OS install and you just didn’t notice.
Definitely worth a try, but in my experience it generally ends up in this weird state where the repair utilities/commands can’t detect the Windows install. Assuming that it’s the issue I’ve run into where it moves it’s entire bootloader onto another drive. There is probably a way to fix it, but I have probably spent more time researching how to fix it than the time it takes to back up my data and reinstall everything.
Could be wrong on this, but I am really doubtful that Pop!_OS is what messed the boot sector/configuration of you Windows install up. Especially from everything I’ve read about systemd-boot.