I needed a test VM at work the other day so I just went with Debian because why not, during the install I chose KDE plasma as the DE. I did nothing else with it after installing it and after leaving it alone for a while (somewhere between 20-60 minutes) the CPU useage shot up to the point vSphere sent out an alert and the VM was unresponsive (the web console just showed a blank console which I couldn’t type in) It did this every time I booted the VM.
It seems to be the combination of vSphere Debian and KDE that causes this as I installed GNOME on the same VM and it was fine. I also created another Debian VM this time choosing GNOME during the install and that was also fine, until I installed KDE on that and then it started doing the same thing. I also created an Arch VM with KDE and that didn’t have any issues.
Any idea why this combination causes issues? Journalctl output of the last boot from both Debian VMs below:
Original VM: https://text.is/032Z Secondary test VM: https://text.is/JR45
I just left it as default which is 1 display and 8mb video memory
8MB?! That is abysmally low for KDE. Depending on the apps you’re using, I’d recommend allocating at least 256MB, if you’re going to use it for actual productivity tasks.
Edit: Here’s a screenshot from nvtop showing my VRAM usage on KDE 5.27:
As you can see, Plasma alone is using 209MB, and Kwin 175MB, and this is with nothing but just Plasma and Konsole running on a very basic desktop (no fancy widgets, just one panel). Now this is at 2880x1800, so if your VM is running at a lower resolution you’d need lesser VRAM, but you can use that as a reference to see how much VRAM KDE really needs.
I just tried increasing it but the maximum I can set is 255 and that made no difference unfortunately. All the Windows VMs are also set at 8 and they don’t have any problems