So my workflow is typically hit start -> cmd -> enter which I can usually do these 3 actions in less than 2 seconds on Windows. I’ve tried a dozen different distros on Wayland, X11, with and without the Nvidia proprietary drivers. KDE search seems to be too slow for me to do this though. Cinnamon, Gnome, Mate, and XFCE don’t seem to have this problem. Is there a way to speed up the KDE start search or to at least somehow buffer the enter input so I am not stuck pressing enter again?
First you can try disabling animations, i.e., setting the animation speed to ‘Instant’ (System Settings → Workspace Behavior → Animation Speed). Then the launcher will appear much quicker when you press ‘Start’ / the ‘Meta’ key.
Then you can try disabling some search plugins. To the right of the search field in the launcher, there’s a settings icon. Click on it and then on the ‘Configure Enabled Search Plugins…’ button. (The name of the button is misleading; you can also disable plugins here.) A good strategy is to first disable all plugins and see if this helps. If it does, enable each plugin you need, one by one, until the search becomes slow again.
I know this is not really answering your question but I use yakuake on KDE, which is a drop-down terminal, and it uses F12 as the shortcut to open. Very fast, no hassle. Depending on how you set it up you can exit by F12 again, or it will hide when it loses focus i.e. you click somewhere outside of it.
I used to use Yakuake but realized I don’t always want a terminal. In fact, most of the time I do not want a terminal and if I do, I want it at a specific location. So most of the time I use the start->typing thing for firefox, steam, blender, and sometimes terminals that I am just going to use to run system-wide commands in.
Weird. It’s always been fast for me.
Is something throttling your CPU ? Have you tried using ALT+F2 to search ? But even if you had not it should be quick to search…
Nothing is throttling my CPU unless it’s somehow defaulted on in OpenSuse, Manjaro, Debian, or Linux Mint. Also these same distros, I installed other DEs on and had it work just fine. It’s a AMD Ryzen 9 3900x 4 ghz 12 cores.
This is specifically a KDE problem. So question, if you do windows key -> term/kon -> enter. As quickly as you can, does it accept the enter input and immediately launch your terminal?
I may not be as fast as you, but yeah it does work. Then again, I’m not using the default launcher.
I only notice it slightly slower on my intel i5 3rd gen machine. Which is exlected.
Oh what launcher are you using?
It’s called
minimal menu
@MJBrune @Ashiette I tried doing it as quickly as I can and it didn’t work the first time (result appeared what looks like about 0.1-0.2s later) but it did work in subsequent attempts (even when looking for other apps)
CPU: i5-1135G7If you look for an app and then for a different app, does it find it quickly? I suspect it might be reading the .desktop files lazily (meaning it only reads them the first time you look for something)
Edit: nvm ksycoca is there to prevent thatEven if I look for the same app over and over again, it doesn’t speed up. Doesn’t seem like a caching issue to me. Perhaps the second time you were just .1-.2 seconds slower on the enter button?
