Panels are generally quite buggy in Plasma, they look nice once set up but editing them is such PITA and sometimes results in Plasma freezing entirely. The Weather and Color Picker widgets simply disappear repeatedly, I gave up on them. At least, since then, my main panel has been behaving nearly normally for a while.
But I have a panel set up on the right side that only contains four Sticky Note widgets and two spacers on top and bottom. Every time I log in, it looks like this:
It’s not enough to simply click around the panel, I have to enter and exit panel configuration mode to make it look as it’s supposed to, like this:
Here is the panel configuration, no, I don’t want to auto-hide it and making other changes, such as opacity->adaptive doesn’t make a difference:
Changing it back to non-floating makes it look like this:
System info:
Thanks!
Thanks again 
Though this never affects my main panel, which has the same settings including “fit content”. But maybe there are some other specific conditions that cause this? Anyway, looking forward to Plasma 6.3.
Edit:
Oh wait, duh… my main panel is “custom size”, so I guess this is the one difference that I missed. I’ll set the side panel to custom and see if that fixes this.
Edit:
Yup. That was it. I’ve set this panel to custom size and it no longer happens. I rebooted three times and it used to happen on every reboot.
Thanks for helping me out again 
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Note: This issue isn’t present under X11…
I’m not surprised, kind of expected it. Many issues I saw are related to “not being X11”. But I want to stay on Wayland since “it’s teh future!”.
However, I might in the end go back to X11 for the time being but I still need to install Linux on my main PC that uses GSYNC and that will be the deciding factor. Some say that VRR works better under Wayland.
Though so far the issues amount to annoyances.
I tried with Wayland, I really did. But the sad reality is that at this point in time there’s just too many compromises in comparison to X11. I even swapped out my single HiDPI 4k monitor for dual matched 1200p monitors in the same orientation just to run Wayland.
Unless you’re running mismatched monitors with differing refresh rates, X11 ‘just works’ with little in the way of compromises. The floating panel issue was just one of many issues I encountered running Wayland.
I know. This is a major hurdle in my journey from Windows to Linux as I own two recent NVIDIA GPUs which make the Wayland issues worse. I only run single monitors but one of them is a GSYNC display and I haven’t gotten to it yet.
The first desktop I’ve installed Fedora KDE on just uses HDMI @100Hz and I see no major issues. But there are are lots of small annoyances. In itself, each of those annoyances is not a big deal, but the accumulated effect of “a thousand paper cuts” makes it difficult at times. This doesn’t work, that crashes, this feature missing, etc. 16 years in development and Wayland lacks basic features and stability still.
But I’m I’m putting in effort to stick to Wayland for now. Once I move my main desktop to Fedora and see how GSYNC works and do some X11 vs. Wayland tests, I will decide what to do.
Since I’m a new Linux desktop user, I have no preference, other than being already annoyed by Wayland LOL. In the end I’ll pick what works best with my GSYNC display.
