There are upstream bugs like bug 311799 or bug 347237, where the GPU goes full power to do an animation. We can't really prevent it, but we could provide an option to turn off Plasma animations. We do have it in some property in the theme object iirc. But before simply turning off all animations, I think we should spend some time to think what to replace the animations with, eg. when copying files, the spinning wheel shows activity, it should be replaced at least with something sensible that shows "I'm copying files" but is not animated.
<mgraesslin> can we detect that and turn off when needed <mgraesslin> doing the sane thing instead of adding a knob to workaround ;-) I'd support approach like this^. Not sure how to go about it though.
Or we could fix QML by providing partial repaints and other stuff so the spinner no longer eats up all CPU. It clearly did not in the 4.x times before it was done in QML *duck*
I would prefer an option to just shut animatinos off completely since even even if the bug in QML were fixed, animations still--unnecessarily!--eat up precious cpu cycles. We could probably even replace animations with just coloring the icons differently to show some action is taking place.
+1 for this, since the CPU still goes to 100% when spinners are shown (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=312919)
We have this now! System Settings > Behavior > General Behavior > Set animation speed slider to "Instant"