u/v81d

Hello,

I’ve been using KDE Plasma for some time now after having been on GNOME and other DEs/WMs for a while (though I'm still fairly new). However, there seems to be an issue that only affects me when I use Plasma, but not other desktops (like GNOME).

When my laptop is plugged in to AC power, the desktop runs smoothly as expected. However, when I unplug my laptop and let it run on battery, the frame rate drops noticeably and causes stuttering across my entire desktop (including my cursor and scrolling). Despite being on a 60 Hz laptop display, the FPS fluctuates between ~40-55 FPS when there’s movement.

I’ve tried disabling Power Profiles Daemon or using performance mode (which isn’t exactly ideal anyway since I’m on a laptop) along with tweaking a bunch of kernel parameters (like disabling Intel Panel Self Refresh), but nothing seems to have fixed the issue or even improved it.

I’ve searched far and wide but I haven’t found any posts or articles about this problem. Is anyone experiencing something similar, or does anyone know of a potential solution to this? Thanks!

Some system details in case it’s needed:

Operating System: NixOS 26.05
KDE Plasma Version: 6.6.4
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.25.0
Qt Version: 6.11.0
Kernel Version: 6.18.26 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 22 × Intel® Core™ Ultra 7 155H
Memory: 16 GiB of RAM (15.0 GiB usable)
Graphics Processor 1: Mesa Intel® Arc (Primary GPU)
Graphics Processor 2: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 6GB Laptop GPU/PCIe/SSE2
Manufacturer: ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC.
Product Name: ASUS Vivobook Pro 15 N6506MJ_Q533MJ
System Version: 1.0