What alternative would you suggest?
A, rolling release first, distro (e.g. Arch or Void) with no DE installed.
But you’re probably not ready for that.
For me, a terminal and Firefox are the only GUI apps really needed. mpv too if it counts.
But I’m someone who has been running Arch+AwesomeWM for ~15 years ago (been using Arch for even longer). So I probably can’t meaningfully put myself in new users’ shoes.
Is your browser Firefox?
What kind of storage devices do you have? NVMe?
Did you check with tools like iotop to see if something is going on IO wise?
You assumed that the problem is caused by the CPU being utilized at 100%.
This may not be the case.
A lot of us don’t run a DE at all. I myself use Awesome WM.
For non-tilers, Openbox with some toolbar would be the ideal setup.
I mention this because we (non-DE users) would have no experience with some funky stuff like a possible KDE indexer running in the background killing IO performance and thrashing buffered/cached memory.
Also, some of us run firefox with eatmydata because we hate fsync 🤨
Neither KDE nor Gnome is peak Desktop Linux experience.
Ubuntu and its flavors is not peak distro experience either.
If you want to try Desktop Linux for real, you will need to dip your toes a little bit deeper.
P.S. Since it wasn’t mentioned already, look up cgroups.
Back when I had a humble laptop (pre-Rust), using nice and co. didn’t help much. Custom schedulers come with their own stability and worst-case-scenario baggage. cgroups should give you supported and well-tested tunable kernel-level resource usage control.
This hasn’t been my experience when no swapping is involved (not a concern for me anymore with 32GiB physical RAM with 28GiB zram).
And I’ve been Rusting since v1.0, and Linuxing for even longer.
And my setup is boring (and stable), using Arch’s LTS kernel which is built with CONFIG_HZ=300. Long gone are the days of running linux-ck.
Although I do use craneleft backend now day to day, so compiles don’t take too long anyway.
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you wouldn’t know because…
you don’t have a single clue about what they are actually doing.