I’d hope not. But worth double checking in case it’s causing an animation thread to always be running or something.
Plasma 6.3 has come out and I retested my power draw, it seems that I now idle around 8W of draw instead of 12-15, which is quite the improvement.
Plasma’s power draw is much more volatile and bounces around a lot, but that’s always been the case. I found I really like lxqt’s consistent low-power draw (6.7W) that doesn’t budge on it’s own. If I wasn’t experiencing some weird bugs on lxqt (such as clicking the screen in some specific but random places always opens the network/wifi manager even if there’s no network icon there) I’d experiment with switching to it entirely.
At least my fans out spinning loud just sitting at the desktop anymore.