Hello all!

I just set up Kubuntu 20.04.1 LTS on a desktop PC with Ge-force GTX 960, 24GB RAM and an Intel i5 CPU.
I have different partitions for / , /var , /home and /boot. / is on a SSD, the rest is on a HDD.
I did some customization via the system settings. Apart from sublime text, woeUSB and a few fonts and themes for the OS I haven't installed anything yet.

My problem:
When I try to drag & drop a folder or file to reposition it on the desktop Whenever I do something, sometimes even if I'm doing nothing, the desktop and the taskbar become unresponsive for a second or two. Other windows like Firefox remain responsive, CPU usage sometimes spikes to 100% for a split second, but usually remains low.
Another issue that might be related to that: I need to refresh the desktop manually (pressing F5) after creating a new file/folder or when changing contents of desktop through dolphin, otherwise it won't appear on the desktop (dolphin shows the created file/folder). This second problem seems to always happen when creating libre office files, rarely or not at all for other files.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

It got a lot worse. It definitely seems to be related to cpu usage. I currently have a kworker using 81% cpu and ksoftirqd using 19%.

I've found that this could be the symptom of some problem with interrupts. Here they are (sorry for mobile phone photo, only way to easily share that console right now)



Any ideas what could cause these problems? Currently the system is completely unusable, it takes minutes to do anything, if I'm lucky.

A few other things come to mind:
* do you have a SWAP space configured? Even with a lot of RAM it can be a good idea
* do you have enough space on your /home and /var partitions?
* Are you using Desktop Effects? Especially with NVIDIA graphic card drivers this can cause some strange behavior, disabling Desktop Effects selectively is a suggestion to find the culprit.

FWIW: I have a probably much older and slower PC than you with only 8GB RAM and see no such problems, SWAP space of 20 GB, Intel onboard Graphics

Thanks for the ideas!
But I think I just found the strange reason for the lag. I have a storage partition where my document, videos, etc... folders link to. At some point I removed the /etc/fstab auto mount of that partition, so the links pointed into nowhere. As soon as I mounted the storage partition again, the lag was gone.

No clue if a simple link into nowhere can cause those problems, maybe something else changed by mounting the storage partition again?
It's fixed now though and after hours of searching that's good enough for me ^ ^

This is likely due to Baloo trying to index this for the Plasma search if you have indicated it as a searchable location. It will run into repeated errors as it simply expects it to be available.