As discussed in other places in this forum, we are using Qubes as our main OS at work (currently about 10 people).
With a slowly but steadily growing team we recently started to have our first Qubes user with little tech experience. She is working mainly on accounting tasks. As these rely on LO spreadsheets, we stumbled upon this issue after a while.
The thing is: Qubes is that different from the accustomed “regular computer” user experience for her that she didn’t bring up this issue on her own. Instead, it became apparent only when others were sitting with her at her desk, realising that LO was “very slow” or even “unusable” (depending on one’s own expectations/experiences/tolerance).
I think lots of hiccups or smaller issues can be hidden underneath this layer of “I know Qubes is different and I don’t expect it to behave as I am used to”. Nevertheless, they are bugs that can be tackled to improve the Qubes user experience.
In this particular case, the problem became visible after changing from a Qubes 4.0 installation to Qubes 4.1 (no upgrade, but a clean reinstall with restored AppVMs if I am not mistaken), both on an older, (but by no means ancient or computationally weak) ThinkPad T450.
The “quick fix” for us was to upgrade her hardware to a T470 with a quad core CPU. Currently, this works much smoother but I guess the underlying issue still exists. We are understaffed in IT Support personnel and have not yet found the time to debug this further. She reports that the new hardware is “much better”.
It seems that short tests with LO spreadsheets on other systems indicate similar behaviour across all devices: the Qubes 4.1 installations are much slower and show the same 100% Xorg CPU usage effect. All devices are ThinkPads, but across multiple generations (T450, T470, T490).
I don’t know if this is a point in favor of this being a more widespread issue because of our homogeneous hardware, but then again ThinkPads are quite common among Linux (and Qubes) users.