Hi everyone, I been getting some odd stutters on the Cinnamon desktop lately. Normally I notice this happen whenever I drag windows around the screen, scrolling through pages and tabs on Firefox - it doesn't seem to affect Youtube videos, games or anything like that but it's still a very persistent irritation I would hope to figure out at some point.
What's odd is this problem only seems to show up after Cinnamon starts to use up at least 250MB in RAM and resetting Cinnamon temporarily helps alleviate the issue, but it climbs from 100MB upon to reset to 250MB within a couple of days, making me reset Cinnamon very regularly when it gets on my nerves.
I tried a ton of different settings, even on my monitor in case it was hardware related but nothing has proven fruitful. I suspected it could be a vsync-related issue (or whatever they call it for this DE) but they removed the option to change that in the compositing settings some time ago, so I'm currently at a dead end right now.
I been searching so many different forums on Arch, Linux Mint (since the Mint team created Cinnamon) and many other places but I've yet to find any concrete answers whatsoever. The only mention I found of my issue is a post on Reddit from a few years ago that these stutters happen very often on Arch-based systems for several years but nobody has seemingly found any kind of solution. Normally I don't post to ask for help since I try to figure problems out myself, but I really am stumped here and would appreciate any kind of pointers right now.
I can try changing kernel, though I'll have to get back to you later on that one because I have things to do until then.
As for updates I've tried updating several times, there's been at least one Cinnamon update but it didn't fix my problem. I guess I could make a Linux Mint account to let the team know in case it's a problem they have to fix on their end, while I try other things in the meantime.
There should be a log called .xsession-errors in your home folder that may have some clues. Paste the contents into a paste bin, such as the one linked in the top-right corner of the forum, or do something like this:
Here you go, I'm not quite sure what to look for in here personally as I'm still not super well versed in troubleshooting Linux yet. But hopefully this can give some insight in what's going on.
I did turn it off before but I wasn't too convinced if it did anything to fix it, so I turned it back on. Though I can certainly give it a go, just know it will likely take two days before I can give any results on whether it works or not
Sadly changing up my kernels doesn't seem to have done the trick, I've tried Zen, Xanmod, standard Arch kernel and LTS and it seems like the problem is here to stay from the looks of things Not really sure what else I can do about the problem if I'm being perfectly honest with you, tried just about everything I can think of.
Had to redo my comment because I forgot to make it an actual reply, oh dear.
Hey there, I did have fractional scaling disabled and did disable all extensions, though I am apprehensive about disabling all of the applets, since I'd end up having to use my system almost entirely by terminal that way which isn't my cup of tea But do let me know if any applets in particular are known to cause problems so I can disable those.
Also as a side note, when I said this stutter issue doesn't affect games, on a closer inspection and more thorough testing with things I play such as GZDoom, it actually does cause stutter in those too until I reset Cinnamon. Makes this whole problem even more frustrating to deal with
Well I have made some small progress on my issue, seems like the stutter I found in games is seemingly fixed (so far). What I ended up doing is disabling performance tweaks, turned off TearFree, disabled hardware acceleration in my browsers and uninstalled Gnome Software (which I installed myself a while back); so far the stuttering games have stopped.
I believe I know what caused this problem and I think it's due to a pamac related dependency that Gnome Software uses, I've had a LOT of performance issues with Pamac in the past as it made games like Cyberpunk 2077 and others run SO much worse than software like mangohud said it was. I don't use Gnome Software anymore so getting rid of that is not an issue to me, so I'll suss things out by re-enabling the other measures one by one to see if the issues lied in them instead.
As for windows stuttering when dragging them around, that's annoyingly still an issue, so clearly these two different kinds of stutters are completely unrelated. For now I'll try nailing down the cause with the thread filo linked and see what I can do from there. But for the time being, this issue has been made a lot more bearable to work with in the meantime.
So, I've had a similar issue myself with Cinnamon--and not with any other Garuda DE. It locks up and asks me if I'd like to disable extensions, etc. and reboot the DE, to which saying 'yes' usually does the trick but its annoying, since have 32 gigs of RAM and the DE seems to be running out of memory, but, I can't remember where the setting is to increase graphic RAM.
Thanks in advance for any help. I'm not a noob, but I'm not a CLI warrior either.
I don’t think that would be matter. Cinnamon is actually lightweight enough and is made to keep UI “simple”, “clean” and “elegant”. It is not meant to be used with fancy extensions and applets at all.
I mean you can use them, but they often have bugs in them, and are generally less maintained.
So, most probably it is an extension or applet gone faulty, and not the issue with your pc.
I believe there are a couple enabled by default; go ahead and disable them by highlighting the extension and clicking the - button on the bottom of the window.
Not really sure what else I can do about the problem if I'm being perfectly honest with you, tried just about everything I can think of.
But do let me know if any applets in particular are known to cause problems so I can disable those.
