I've been suffering from a slow startup issue of Plasma since a couple of months ago. It took 10-30s to bring me to the desktop after entering the password.

I thought it was caused by the Qt issue at first but it turned out that Qt 5.8 failed to fix my problem.

Then I noticed that only the initial start after boot was slow, subsequent ones would be way faster. So it must be a caching issue. And finally after several hours of exploration, my eyes were laid on the

Code: Select all

export XDG_CACHE_HOME=/tmp

that I've got in my .zshenv file

Many suggestions to make SSDs live longer include this trick which moves X cache to a memory disk. But for whatever reason, Plasma or Qt has been heavily relying on this cache (because of Qml I guess).

Removing this line shortened the startup time to 2-3s in my case Yay!