Linux in a VM runs better than the one on the host?

i just installed a different distro in VB,and maybe because it was another desktop environment(xfce and I’m on KDE),the performance was much better.
i haven’t had much time with it yet,but the Firefox experience for example was great;clean fast and smooth:loading pages,scrolling,watching videos etc.and that’s after i made some tinkering with the host’s one in order for it to perform better.
(i put the same add-ons on both apart from one or two).

i read that Kde is a bit heavy,but i didn’t think that my laptop(i7, nvme ssd,16GB ram)will struggle with it,and this while ksysguard shows ~550mb of ram used on idle.

any ideas why this is?

XFCE is known to be very light, any distro that runs in a vm does not have to carry the load of the hardware. So that’s a double wammy when comparing it to KDE. I prefer Cinnamon myself, but for a daily driver between KDE and XFCE, I would go for KDE, i like nice animations, and fancy things :grin:

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@linub That’s a true thing. XFCE is lightweight Desktop and therefore runs much smoother, but it has not everywhere GUIs like KDE have. Although KDE is more windows-like and inherits the bloat of windows stuff in some parts., meaning “everything has a GUI” and have nice animations, which of course depresses the performance and response time.

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i understand,
also i was wondering;
could it also be related to the fact the OS in the VM has and older/stable LTS Kernel while the host’s one is 5.10, or it doesn’t matter since it really relies on the Host’s ones anyway?

KDE in Manjaro by default carries a heavy file search indexer. Disable it in KDE settings or via terminal (baloo), restart and things should be smooth again.
Also, you can disable compositing (as VM most likely doesn’t have 3D acceleration or have emulated graphics) or change compositing backend to xrender (from default OpenGL). You do that in KDE settings center just like with file indexer.

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i doubt that baloo is an issue for my part since i don’t usually have many files under home/username.
maybe a bit because of Krunner?
i found an interesting article regarding it:
https://www.ordinatechnic.com/blog/1/Desktop%20Environments/2/Plasma/effect-kde-plasma-baloo-file-indexing-and-file-search-framework-system-performance

about changing compositing to xrender;i saw many people saying they have a better experience with xrender on KDE,
but i wonder what would be the cons/what would i be missing without opengl?

Nothing. Xrender is a software render I think. But your VM doesn’t have hardware 3D anyway.

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If no driver or the wrong driver is used the desktop effects fall back to an non-accelerated backend (XRender).

https://userbase.kde.org/Desktop_Effects_Performance#Selecting_the_correct_driver

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