Is there anything else that sticks out to you so far?
Unfortunately not. I’m downloading the latest Kubuntu and Fedora KDE right now, to see if I can reproduce the issue, as well as something older (ideally 6.1?).
Thank you for sticking with me on this. It’s been one of the most bizarre issues I think I’ve ever had with a linux desktop that didn’t involve an Nvidia GPU. I’m shocked that nobody else on the Framework forums is talking about this.
Will report back with my findings on other distros.
Well that’s just proof that Fedora is the superior operating system!
Kidding, of course…if you’re willing to go through the hassle, the ultimate test might be actually going ahead and installing Fedora on another partition, or an extra disk if you have one, and seeing if a fully-updated Fedora 41 installation exhibits the same behavior.
If it does, then it’s almost assuredly one of the updates that you listed out early on, possibly some knock-on effect from the cursor-handling changes?
If it doesn’t, then that could give you a basis point from which you could add back on customizations from your current, main Arch Linux installation until something triggers the error to start happening again.
One other thought for now…are you able to see when the kernel 6.12 update happened on your system? (Any chance it was almost right at the same time as the big KDE update?) Only asking as since you’re using AMD graphics, your graphics drivers (with which KWin and things like that will interact closely) are in the kernel and it might be worth ruling that out - Fedora is still testing kernel 6.12, so ex. my fully-updated system is on 6.11.10 still.
Ok, installed fedora on a USB and ran an update, with these versions, the issue is not present. This makes me think maybe it really was something in Kernel 6.12?
To answer your question, I upgraded Linux on Nov 23
[2024-11-23T16:11:51-0500] [ALPM] upgraded linux (6.11.6.arch1-1 -> 6.12.1.arch1-1)
But interestingly, I didn’t upgrade kwin until a bit later. I unfortunately can’t recall exactly when these issues began, but they were definitely happening the week of Thanksgiving, and I’m almost 100% sure I saw it Sat, Nov 23.
It could very well be an issue in the AMD drivers built-in to kernel 6.12 so far, then…that kernel, and the Mesa version (Fedora on 24.2, Arch on 24.3) should be the only major difference between the Fedora installation there and your original Arch Linux installation - but the KDE stack should be identical at this point, between those two installs…
So…at least it’s not just you and not just your particular hardware?
It might be helpful to keep that Fedora installation around, if you can, until Fedora gets kernel 6.12 and see if the problem starts at that point!
Since we’re speculating about the kernel - what about if you install the linux-lts kernel on your Arch Linux installation and boot using that? If that does display the issue, then… perhaps a wild Mesa appears and is the culprit?
Installed and switched to linux-lts (6.6.64-1-lts), and the problem is not present. Seems highly likely that this is a kernel bug now. I’ll keep running LTS for a while and see if I notice any further issues.
I will also keep an eye on Fedora news and wait for them to mainline 6.12 and make sure to check Arch’s stable kernel version every so often. Maybe if I have time, I’ll bisect the kernel this weekend and see if I can figure out when exactly this started happening.
