I received notification that Alien BOB had uploaded the most recent upgrades of Plasma 5 so, eager with anticipation, I downloaded it and proceeded to upgrade my system. Except that the result was not as I expected.

The startup time was noticeably longer. I didn't measure the time, but it looked approximately 10-20 seconds longer than 5.14.5. I don't know which of the changes the KDE developers made is responsible for the slowdown, but even after bootup, other sluggish behavior becomes apparent. The notification for volume changes does not smoothly fade out, but is jerky; system settings is slower to launch and change categories. I kept the previous set as backup, and so I reverted the upgrade.

The result was as I suspected: the startup time was notably shorter, much as I had had before the upgrade. With all due respect to the effort made by Alien BOB, I have to reluctantly recommend sitting this month's update out, and sticking with 5.14.5. Now, if anyone has a different experience, please let me know.

Just my

I upgraded this morning and it performs well for me. Have not seen any sluggishness so far.

Did you install all of the new packages that were added this month?

It is running great for me so far. is your friend

This happened also for me, but disappeared after rebooting

You could also check whether baloo_file_extractor is running and consuming most of your CPU resources.
If that is the case, you can disable the indexing of file content (you can leave the incexing of filenames enabled as that does not consume resources).

Alternatively you can temporarily suspend baloo, stop the indexer, stop baloo, then delete the complete baloo directory with the index database, and then start baloo again. It will create a new database, it will read the content of all files on your disk if you let it, but it will do that a lot faster with a fresh empty database is my experience. During that time it will consume a lot of CPU, but that will stop and afterwards, adding/changing files will no longer lead to high baloo CPU usage.

The news plasma5 alien packages work fine, here

I'm going to go ahead and mark this as [SOLVED]. It appears I was a bit hasty in posting; the startup time, while at first appeared to be longer, overall was not as bad, and the desktop is not as sluggish as I first believed. Next time, I'll just bide my time and see whether things are just different, or if there really is a problem.

Sometimes when you install a new version of Plasma, the first time it starts it takes longer than normal, since it needs to initialize some first-run-oriented settings and so forth.

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That's what I concluded, after I stopped to think about it.

Actually, I did, after the usual upgradepkg routine. Which brings up an interesting question. Do the new files drastically affect startup time?

Well, you never know. The new packages get added for a reason, and if some startup library is not found, that may cause issues.

That is very true. Well, since the issue I perceived never really existed, I'll just keep that in mind for next time.