Solved: Desktop/Mouse incredibly slow after upgrading

I had a very acceptable desktop working for months on Rocky 9 with KDE Plasma on Wayland with NVIDIA drivers. Today I upgraded and now when I see the login screen it appears both the desktop visuals and the mouse cursor movement are glacially slow.

Oddly, there is a brief moment at the login screen where the mouse moves quickly but suddenly everything is incredibly slow.

The CPU and GPU are not overloaded, they’re at 0%.

I now see that kwin_wayland is pegging one core at 100% usage which I’m sure is related. After 10-15min usage went down to 25-50%. It seems to have gone down to 15% now. Desktop is much more usable. Ah, but if I do anything with window movement, opening or closing, it spikes kwin_wayland and the desktop slows down again.

This bug seems related but I can’t figure out a solution from it: 485425 – Running some Wine applications through Xwayland forces constant fullscreen repaints for the rest of the session

Okay based on this thread/post the issue is that Wayland is not good on <= 1000 series NVIDIA cards which is my case with a 1050: Kwin Using 90+% CPU At All Times - #7 by cscs - Support - Manjaro Linux Forum

You can click the Plasma (Wayland) on the login screen and choose Plasma (X11) and once you login everything is snappy.

You will need to update /etc/sddm.conf and set DisplayManager=x11 to get it to default to Plasma (X11) and be snappy even on the login screen.

Ugh.

I don’t see any immediate obvious drawbacks to X11 vs Wayland so that’s good. I’m used to KDE on X11 anyway coming from CentOS 7… Okay there are some minor drawbacks like intelligent new window placement, some virtual desktop features aren’t the same, but it’s largely workable. X11 doesn’t seem to have the flickering desktop issue which I was having with VirtualBox so that’s good.

The lock screen is freezing up now but it eventually displays the password field with enough keyboard/mouse input

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