So I have been trying to find various ways to speed up the performance of my new GNU/Linux system. I decided to search for KDE speed improvements and came across this YouTube video:

I tried the trick, killing Plasma and rerunning it using the Qt 4.5 rending method. I received a substantial performance increase in my graphics rendering. To do the same on your system, run the following commands first to see if this trick does speed up your performance:

Then, do some widget resizing, use the launcher menu, etc. The easiest one to see the performance increase, like in the video, is to rotate the folder widget. Mine was jerky without this change and very smooth after the fact.

If this did speed up your system, make the following changes to your /usr/share/autostart/plasma-desktop.desktop file so that it runs the raster graphicssystem by default next time you restart Xorg/KDE:

Add the -graphicssystem raster to the current Exec line so that it looks something like this:

That’s it. Now I did read some downsides (possibly more memory usage) in the More 2D in KDE article linked below, however, for my uses, it seems to help more than it hurts. Your mileage may vary.

References:

Dramatically speed up KDE Plasma
Is KDE4 Slow? (forum.kde.org)
More 2D in KDE