Yesterday KDE had a big update on Arch. I've watched it stay on Arch's Testing Repo for several days, there was 3 pages related to KDE. This morning I boot up, decided to use it, and now I'm thinking of never using my favorite DE again. Every little action is slow, the HD LED stays on for every icon changed, for every little menu that pops up. This is ridiculous. Is this just happening with me? I installed the OS 4 days ago, I don't tweak it at all, so I can't see how the problem would be on my end. Besides, MATE and XFCE work beautifully. Code: local/plasma-desktop 5.6.0-1 (plasma) KDE Plasma Desktop
Well, sometimes it's really an advantage to use Manjaro and get packages a couple of day later, so there is more time to fix possible bugs. Anyways, in the KF5 & Plasma thread on the Arch forum there are posts about some problems after the update (as usual) but also about a noticeable performance improvement. So it might be a specific problem for you.
Athlon II X2 250 @3.7 Ghz NBUS from 1.25 to 1.4 GHz 8 GB DDR3 1600 CL9 (ganged) AMD R9 270X OC Edition It can't be hardware, this was clearly an update problem. Nothing visual was added, actually. Besides, after loging off from KDE and then loging into MATE made MATE broke, like if there was a problem with gvfs (install a dummy package of gvfs and you'll see MATE broken). But does Manjaro have a team dedicated to fix these bugs? I don't think I can use Manjaro. It's way to difficult to install it with custom crypto functions. But aside from that, it's a great OS. Maybe. I mean, today was the first day I used KDE after the last OS installation. In addition, it seems KDE won't work well with MATE and XFCE installed. Anyways, I just removed the entire KDE group.
Well, they do fix things, indeed. All packages from the Arch repos first go into the unstable branch, then into the testing branch and finally into the stable branch. They fix things if they get feedback form the unstable/testing branch users, and in the meanwhile fixed Arch packages might have been arrived, too. And if it comes to KDE/Plasma: The guy who maintains those packages for Manjaro is also the maintainer of the Netrunner Rolling distro. Another reason is that they do not provide linux-grsec. So definitely not suitable for you BTW, I got Plasma 5.6 yesterday on the Manjaro testing branch and it works flawlessly for me.
Disable overclocking, set RAM to Unganged as Ganged performs slower, use some tool and see what clocks does the video card uses.Make sure RAM runs in dual channel as per DIMM-s usage and it s a matched pair. The CPU is quite weak, search for some Phenom 2 instead (tri or quad core, what the mobo alows), they should be cheap now used.. What motherboard you have there ?