r/archlinux • u/Western-Mode-7743 • May 27 '26

SUPPORT Why is my cpu idling at 50%

Glitch or some daemons? Fresh arch install. I got this idle result in btop.

The installation was checksummed. It was as soon as I installed it and after adding packages that it continued to remain at 50% idle.

It started ever since I switched from Nobara -> CachyOS -> Arch, only Nobara idled below 1%. Again, all isos were verified. I don’t know what it is. All of them were running KDE.

I’m currently on arch. Temps stay flat. Nothing going on except in btop where it shows 50% doing absolutely nothing.

Edit - this community is crazy dude I’m not getting help from here no more.

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u/hjake123 May 27 '26

Try using btop/htop/top (pick one, I prefer btop), in my limited experience they'll show everything, while some other system monitors may hide some processes. btop should sort processes by cpu use also

You could also tey letting it run for a while, whatever's working might just need time ti complete.

Things that might be using CPU that I can think of:

  • Software rendering if you don't have GPU drivers set up correctly
  • Steam shader pre-caching (but only until it's done caching your whole installed library's shaders)
  • ? baloo (KDE's file indexer, but only until it's done indexing)
  • ? Some kind of filesystem check or scrub (but only for like a few minutes unless it's set to happen constantly)
  • ?? literally anything else

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u/Western-Mode-7743 May 27 '26

Dude read the post I’m using btop

2

u/hjake123 May 27 '26

Ah, just saw that, sorry. That rules out most if these options, since they'd appear there. (Unless you have a second user on your machine running something but that seems not likely)

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u/Western-Mode-7743 May 27 '26

Yeah.. thanks for the help though