Slow to load Desktop

[Guest]

So I'm new to Kubuntu and KDE and so far I like the experience with 16.04.
Only thing that's getting to me is that it takes well over a minute for the full DE to load once I've entered my password (only takes a few second to get to the login screen itself)

I have a feeling it's the graphics card only because it's an ATI radeon. Using the open drivers and not ATI proprietary ones, never had a good experience with them.

system specs are
i5
16GB RAM
ATI Radeon R9 270X
SSD

It's a major issue as I can learn to accept it, because once loaded the system is running very nice.

[oshunluvr]

IMO, not likely the graphics card. You'd see more problems after loading the desktop rather than before. You can begin to figure this out by booting without the splash screen and note where things lag. Simply hit the "E" key when the grub menu appears, arrow over to "quiet splash", delete those two words and hit F10 to continue booting.

Then write down where the pauses are in the scrolling text - best to note both the one on the screen and the one right after it. Using your phone to video it is a good way to easily capture and review.

As far as the video drivers go, read /var/log/Xorg.0.log for warnings (WW) and errors (EE).

[oshunluvr]

BTW, another use reports 2-3 seconds between password and desktop, so you definitely have a problem somewhere.

[Teunis]

On this 5 y/o Lenovo laptop (w520, i7, 8GB RAM and SSD) I get around 10 sec for the OS and another 10 sec to the desktop.

Booting from an (obviously external) USB3 disk it's more like 30 seconds from login to desktop.
This tells me the Plasma DE requires a lot of disk I/O and a slow disk will cause the whole system to boot sluggish.

[Guest]

Thanks for the help, after a little more testing I've found that the issue seems to be with the login.
I turned auto login 'on' and the whole system booted super fast. So it seems there's an issue with the login sequence? Not ideal for a system with multiple users.

(mod request to move to software?)

[Teunis]

An interesting observation.

I believe this login stuff is related to KWalletManager, because I always disable it at first opportunity I can't speak from experience.

[jlittle]

Thanks for the help, after a little more testing I've found that the issue seems to be with the login.
I turned auto login 'on' and the whole system booted super fast.

That suggests you should create another user, and see how long a login takes for that user. If it's quick, then there's something in your config that is the cause.

Regards, John Little

[Gavin77]

Does it help if you remove ~/.kde/share/config/plasma-desktop-appletsrc

Taken from https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=360777