So my workflow is typically hit start -> cmd -> enter which I can usually do these 3 actions in less than 2 seconds on Windows. I’ve tried a dozen different distros on Wayland, X11, with and without the Nvidia proprietary drivers. KDE search seems to be too slow for me to do this though. Cinnamon, Gnome, Mate, and XFCE don’t seem to have this problem. Is there a way to speed up the KDE start search or to at least somehow buffer the enter input so I am not stuck pressing enter again?
First you can try disabling animations, i.e., setting the animation speed to ‘Instant’ (System Settings → Workspace Behavior → Animation Speed). Then the launcher will appear much quicker when you press ‘Start’ / the ‘Meta’ key.
Then you can try disabling some search plugins. To the right of the search field in the launcher, there’s a settings icon. Click on it and then on the ‘Configure Enabled Search Plugins…’ button. (The name of the button is misleading; you can also disable plugins here.) A good strategy is to first disable all plugins and see if this helps. If it does, enable each plugin you need, one by one, until the search becomes slow again.