I’m running a 34" ultrawide monitor via HDMI connected to a dock which is connected to my Razer Blade Advance 2020 over USB-C (not Thunderbolt) running Manjaro KDE. When both the laptop display and the external monitor are connected, everything seems to be running as normal. When the laptop lid is closed or the display is set to disabled in Settings > Display and Monitor > Display Configuration, the computer gets very sluggish. Most things move incredibly slowly. Dragging windows, doing anything in the web browser, highlight mouseovers in system settings. This also happens when I don’t use the dock and plug into HDMI directly.
The mouse seems to move at a normal speed and when I’m typing in a terminal window, everything seems fine. I tried Xrender and Open GL 3.1 in the Compositor settings. Xrender seems to make a little difference but the system is still unusable.
As soon as I open the lid, everything goes back to normal on the external monitor. It seems like it might be a GPU issue but I’m not sure where I should be looking to figure that out.
A snapshot of the system log while the laptop lid is closed:
Please read this: How to provide good information
and post some more information so we can see what’s really going on. Now we know the symptom of the disease, but we need some more probing to know where the origin lies…
An inxi --admin --verbosity=7 --filter --no-host --width would be the minimum required information for us to be able to help you. (Personally Identifiable Information like serial numbers and MAC addresses will be filtered out by the above command)
Also, please copy-paste that output in-between 3 backticks ``` at the beginning and end of the code/text.
Does this also happen when you create a new user and log in there?
Thanks for the reply and my apologies for the late response.
I updated my original post with the inxi output you requested. I also tried creating a user and had the same experience. This also happens when at the login greeter and no users are logged in.
I’ve found that using optimus-manager and switching to the nvidia card allows me to turn off the laptop monitor and use the external at normal speed. So this appears to be a GPU issue. I’d prefer to leave optimus-manager in hybrid mode and have the system switch to the dGPU when plugging into the external if possible.
Yeah, that’s how I run and was what I was going to propose to you as a solution.
So if you use the external monitor all or most of the time, just switching to the nVidia permanently is going to make your life much easier. If you use the external monitor infrequently, it’s worth changing to nVidia only when it’s hooked up because you have the 8G VRAM anyway and not using it is not going to extend the life of the card…
Alright sounds like that’s the way to go then. Thanks for all your help.
Is there some way to use optimus-manager in hybrid mode and have the DE loaded onto the Nvidia card by default? I sometimes use a Windows VM via QEMU-KVM and I pass the iGPU to the VM via Intel GVT-g. I imagine that’s not going to work with the iGPU off.
mhwd --listinstalled
> Installed PCI configs:
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NAME VERSION FREEDRIVER TYPE
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video-nvidia 2020.11.30 false PCI
Warning: No installed USB configs!