CachyOS has a handy kernel tool which let’s you select what kernel you’d like to run. You can try and play with that.
i did try the LTS kernel but to no avail. i kept my fingers off the rest as i had no idea what i was doing.

The kernels (and accompanying modules/drivers) are more or less freely interchangeable.

Bugs in the kernel are pretty rare in my experience. I think it’s more likely that the bug was somewhere in KDE Plasma. Kubuntu’s version should be older than the one on Cachy. On top of that Kubuntu has their own patches for KDE, so even if the version numbers are the same they are not the exact same programs. And on top of that the way they compiled KDE will be slightly different.

Bugs in the kernel are pretty rare in my experience

i chalked it up to some kind of optimization that doesn’t agree with my computer but that’s just my head-canon

I think it’s more likely that the bug was somewhere in KDE Plasma. Kubuntu’s version should be older than the one on Cachy. On top of that Kubuntu has their own patches for KDE

interesting, distrowatch says plasma-desktop “6.4.5” for kubuntu 25.10 and “6.5.3” for cachy 251129 (the version i likely was on) so it is a possibility. (plus i feel like it started after an update)

Newest version is 6.6.something so maybe the bug is fixed by now.

in your shoes: i would try distros/implementations without wayland or kde to rule those out as possible sources of the problem.

i know that ubuntu will let you switch to xservers, so kubuntu might let you as well.