It broke for me too, but after a few tweaks to the settings and staying on top of all the bug fixes, is back to usable! I'm in a very similar position, being somewhat unwilling Arch user that accidentally upgraded early, and was prepared to suffer (or even switch distros), but it only took a day or two for my issues to be resolved. Try switching back!

Thanks, I actually tried again today. I still have no panels, no desktop, no keyboard shortcuts and KDE applications have various rendering issues.

I had a few issues on my laptop as well and only upgraded the desktop once the issues on the laptop were resolved (which took a bit more than a week I think?). Was not expecting basically complete breakage.

I think they deprecated the old keyboard shortcuts, had to set mine up fresh. The missing panels is crazy though! Have you tried setting them up from scratch? Ive found it only takes a few minutes to get a nice usable setup (the default panel is great). I'm also sticking to X11 for the foreseeable future, maybe switching to wayland after 6.2 or 6.3

> I think they deprecated the old keyboard shortcuts, had to set mine up fresh.

On my laptop the keyboard shortcuts magically restored themselves after I logged in and out of X11 and Wayland mode a few times. I'd try that on my desktop if I could get the UI for logging out to spawn :) (or the UI to configure the shortcuts)

> Have you tried setting them up from scratch?

I couldn't summon any UI to set them up (remember that there's no panels or desktop to click and that KDE applications in general have rendering issues that can render them unusable). I suspect it won't help though since when I log in I can see them blinking in and out of existence a few times before disappearing permanently, I assume crashing and restarting a few times before giving up on running.

> the default panel is great

I do have quite a bit of customizations on top of the default that I'd rather not lose, but I'll set them up again if I have to. After it looks like it will actually work that is.

Have you tried disabling the compositor (Shift + Alt + F12)? I've found that sometimes fixes graphical issues. No guarantees, but if you haven't already, it's worth a shot.

Thanks for trying, but I've indeed already tried that without success :(

try creating a new temp user account and try there. Should give you a good idea if there's an issue with the software itself or your customizations. Then you can narrow them down.

Thanks, that's a new idea I haven't thought of and indeed a temporary account works! Doesn't quite solve the problem yet but indeed a good starting point to try and figure it out.

Edit: Was able to temporarily "fix" things (doesn't fix rendering issues, but makes desktop usable again) by reseting the panel configuration, and then some simple fixes to its appearance broke everything again... Sounds like it will be a while before Plasma 6 is ready for me to switch back to it.

Mine broke completely on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Turns out I had an old repo that I nuked. Then I logged out of Plasma, logged into an IceWM and reran the `zypper dup` and everything was hunky dory again.