I recently installed Leap 15.6, and am running KDE Plasma 5.27.11. Everything works beautifully, except one thing that I use frequently, the open and save dialogue boxes, are slow, especially with directories with large numbers of files (The problem is worst with > 1,000 files per directory but I notice it to a lesser degree with only a few hundred files.) It slows me down because often the file I want to open is at the top of the list (I have it configured to show the most recently-modified item first) but it sometimes takes a few seconds to load.
I also strongly dislike that the list is still loading and changing too, after the window opens. In the case that I am trying to open a specific file of a file type and there are only a few of that file type in the directory, and many of other types of files, sometimes the list will display one file and I will wrongly think it is the most recently-modified file of that type, and then after a delay, the other files will appear. Also the changing list will push the location of the files down in the list, so sometimes I go to select a file with my cursor, and at the last minute, the file under my cursor changes and I ended up selecting the wrong one. It is an aggravating UI experience.
Is there any way I can speed this up? AND also force it to not modify the list after the window loads? Although I find the delay annoying, the fact that the window displays while the list is still loading and then the order of the files shuffles around dynamically REALLY irritates me because if I act quickly it can make me click on the wrong item.
It worked fine for me under my old install, which used Gnome 42. I.e. the list display was nearly-instantaneous and it never was slow enough to slow down my workflow or cause me to have to wait. I hated Gnome 42 though and I don’t want to go back to Gnome because there are far more things that are worse for my workflow under Gnome…it’s just this one little thing that I would like to get addressed.
I’m using the same filesystem as the old setup, and I am actually running much faster hardware, a faster SSD and faster CPU, yet it is much slower under KDE which is what leads me to believe it’s a KDE problem. It is really annoying to me to have a dialog load this slowly on such new hardware.
This makes me wonder if there is some setting somewhere that I don’t know about, that handles file indexing or the order of display of that list or something, or if it’s a bug in KDE that is causing it to perform this way.