The laptop is a Lenovo Thinkpad T480s, running Ubuntu 22.04. Not a racecar anymore, but it usually runs server applicances and OS'es in VMs without sweating. The VM is a QEMU/KVM instance with 4CPUs, 16G memory and 32G disk, running the UMH Flatcar installation. I could try to raise the VM specs and see if it makes a difference.