Yes it could be anything. I have an old 6th generation i7 system. That’s more than powerful enough for most things even some reasonable gaming. However currently under arch for instance. Power management is totally possible. But not done automatically. Every time I reboot it sets itself to power save by default. And I just haven’t really been bothered enough to go read up on how to permanently change the default. So what ends up happening is I’ll do a reboot every so often and then all the sudden things are running dramatically slower than they should be. Then I slap myself on the forehead go tweak the power profile and it’s all good again. And it legitimately could be something as simple as that. On a newer ryzen system, the exact same distribution of just the power profiles automatically perfectly. Needless to say if there’s anything remotely CPU bound that will definitely have an impact.
Yes it could be anything. I have an old 6th generation i7 system. That’s more than powerful enough for most things even some reasonable gaming. However currently under arch for instance. Power management is totally possible. But not done automatically. Every time I reboot it sets itself to power save by default. And I just haven’t really been bothered enough to go read up on how to permanently change the default. So what ends up happening is I’ll do a reboot every so often and then all the sudden things are running dramatically slower than they should be. Then I slap myself on the forehead go tweak the power profile and it’s all good again. And it legitimately could be something as simple as that. On a newer ryzen system, the exact same distribution of just the power profiles automatically perfectly. Needless to say if there’s anything remotely CPU bound that will definitely have an impact.