K3b Slow and Unresponsive

[geeky-1]

K3b has been slow and unresponsive for me lately (a few months now), so uninstalled and installed the latest version for Ubuntu 20.04, but that version is unresponsive as well. It can take several minutes just to launch and read a disc or even try to open the help/About menu. It's so slow as to be almost unusable. Anybody else experience this issue and know of a fix?

[TenPlus1]

Run a S.M.A.R.T check on your drive, could be errors if it's running that slow.

[geeky-1]

I'll run a disk check when I get a chance. I've noticed in the past couple of weeks, Libre Writer and Spreadsheet take a few seconds to launch when it used to launch immediately with my SATA SSD.
However, K3b also became very slow a few months ago on another computer with Ubuntu 20.04, so I thought maybe there was a compatibility problem with Ubuntu 20.04.

[geeky-1]

K3b is slow on my other computer as well and both computers have been upgraded to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Can you run a SMART check on SSDs? Both computers have SSDs - the one with NVMe SSD, I haven't noticed any slowness with other applications (and I also thought maybe the problem was the optical drive on my basement computer I used in the summer until I moved back upstairs to using my other computer and noticed the problem here as well). K3b does not seem to want to eject a disc either and I have to eject through Nautilus. So I think the problem is with K3b and perhaps compatibility with newer versions of Ubuntu.