Thank you for your reply!
This is definitely a very niche issue, that’s why I didn’t want to bother the devs with a bug report without knowing if it is user error : )
I live on a farm and use mobile hotspot connected to a range extender as my wifi, this range extender is stuck in wpa2/wpa3 mixed mode and I unfortunately cannot set it to be wpa2 only.
Range Extender - TPLink AC750 Wifi Range Extender (was gonna include links but apparently I cannot)
Wireless Dongle - TPLink TL-WN722N High Gain Wireless USB Adapter
I did pacman -Rdd plasma-nm networkmanager-qt plasma-meta plasma-welcome but no bueno, the issue persists.
I also completely reinstalled arch and installed only plasma-desktop instead of meta and the issue is still present!
Attached are the journalctl logs for networkmanager and I photoshopped in the lshw network results as well because new users cannot upload more than one image. (I was gonna copy and paste the text but that becomes huge and borderline unreadable so I attached images instead)
Digging through the whole network manager log I did find this line
Jun 25 14:43:26 DaVinci NetworkManager[589]: <warn> [1750842806.8189] dispatcher: (10) failed (after 0.007 sec): Could not activate remote peer 'org.freedesktop.nm_dispatcher': activation request failed: unit is invalid
But this only happened once and never appears again in the logs so maybe it is some kind of fluke…
Nmtui refuses to connect to the network within plasma and asks me for wifi password sometimes or just flat out refuses to connect.
I think this is a plasma core specific problem because I do not have these issues on any other desktop environments or even a shell session (perhaps something with kdewallet or libsecret?).
I am using cinnamon as a temp environment but it is a bit sad since this issue persists on my main work PC. My old computer (using the same USB wifi dongle same driver and connecting to the same network) somehow magically got fixed…
Thank you so much for your help though Lenzoid! Do you think maybe I have enough information for a bug report?