Animations are slooooow-Animation Slider in settings has no effect

[GnuSense]

SOLVED
I have KDE on 20.04.1 Studio Ubuntu in a decent system (Ryzen 5 1600AF & Radeon RX550/550 using amdgpu with the latest hwe kernel and xorg (installed trying to deal with this issue) and desktop performance is terrible, or at least, the animations are very slow. Going to systemsettings5 General Behavior and adjusting the Animation speed slider has no effect.

I have tried a variety of settings including various scale methods, rendering backends, and making Animation speed "Instant" and I've found the only thing that works is disabling the compositor with "qdbus org.kde.KWin /Compositor suspend" I don't see much in the Xorg.log or journalctl that should explain this. Can anyone give me a clue? I don't think it is the card, I paid a pretty penny to upgrade the card from an old Radeon EAH5450 to fix this issue, I'm not a gamer and don't need 3D, just adequate desktop performance, bug sluggish animations drive me bats. Does anyone know how I can fix the compositor (compositor: kwin_x11 resolution: 1920x1080~60Hz)? I the compositor permanently, but this is a pretty new system with nice hardware and it seems like I should be able to enjoy the eye candy like translucent stuff without having to endure glacial animations.

[jlittle]

I assume that other than the compositor, the computer's performance is ok.

I would first add another user, log out of your normal one, and see if the problem occurs for the new user. If it doesn't you may be able to track down the cause, or at least recover an acceptable subset of your settings.

Sent from my VFD 822 using Tapatalk

[GnuSense]

Other than the animations the computer seems fine. Thanks for the suggestion, Little John. I should have thought of that myself. I created a second user and the animations are fine and I can indeed use instant animations while desktop effects are enabled, so the problem is in my profile. Somewhere.

Bleck.
I guess I can back up my ~/local/share folder and maybe remove likely looking subdirectories a few at a time. I really don't want to have to start over at the beginning, the reason I prefer KDE is that I can customize it 6 ways to Sunday, and I have. Maybe disabling desktop effects isn't so bad...

Maybe I can track down some sort of plasma log files that might give me a clue what to whack.

[jlittle]

... I prefer KDE is that I can customize it 6 ways to Sunday, and I have...

I understand, I'm like that... I did a clean install of 20.04, and a month later, I wasn't finished re-customizing; a huge amount of work.

I'd start by clearing ~/.cache (I clear it often, before backing up), and log out and in. Then, look at ~/.config/kwinrc and ~/.config/plasma*.

[GnuSense]

Well, problem solved. Removing/renaming the ~/.cache didn't help, in fact it threw a scare into me when I logged back in and had no widgets, couldn't left click on the desktop, etc., but figured out it was because I had multiple startplasma-x11 and plasmashell programs running, so I was able to fix that.

But I looked over ~/.config/kwinrc and didn't see anything that looked crucial, so I renamed that file and logged back in, and while I lost a few customizations, animations are now instant (I may dial it back to VERY fast, which is where I like them), so I'm a happy camper. Thanks for the help jlittle.

One neat side effect, this is a MUCH better graphics card than I normally use (I prefer onboard stuff since my demands in that department are light), so when I set the Animation Speed slider in systemsettings>General Behavior I found that animation behavior was so fast that I had to set the slider to position 6 out of 9 to see any hint of animation, I normally set it for 8 and the animations are still slightly slower than I would prefer.

I don't see how to mark the post Solved, and my dog is asking for a walk, but if any mod sees this feel free to mark it solved.