Thanks, I will try that!
In the meantime, I noticed that half of the issues I had - specifically, the screen freezing and the broken Qt apps - were immediately resolved by switching to the legacy X11 session, while also fixing some other issues I hadn’t noticed I had before, related to blurry fonts in several programs. Meanwhile, the sticky cursor seems to have been related to a hot corner I forgot to disable, d’oh.
Anyway, I’m not sure what’s causing those two Wayland issues, and it frustrates me because I don’t trust Xorg at all due to its security flaws, plus switching to the X session brought in several frustrating issues of its own that didn’t happen in the Wayland session (other apps gained a blurry font rendering, some apps and menus stopped working and several windows always open glued on the top left corner of my screen). So I’m kinda stuck with a frustrating experience no matter which option I choose.
The screen freezing issue seemed to be present, though that was a bit aggravated by me keeping the Gnome display ratio on 60 Hz despite my monitor being 75 Hz, as I wasn’t sure if it’d be secure to change it from a live environment. Something else I noticed is that, on Wayland, my desktop runs extremely slow if it’s running on 60 Hz, which doesn’t seem to happen (or at least not as harshly) on X11. I’m not sure if that’s inherently a Wayland thing or if my ISO somehow got corrupted.
Admittedly, my ISO having gotten corrupted would certainly explain the kernel-core crash issue. I do know that, after my fresh install, the first thing I did was attempt to update from the GNOME Software application, but when I rebooted to apply the updates, the installer abruptly ended at 13% and rebooted without applying the updates (my system booted back into the 5.14 kernel rather than 5.17, and GNOME Software still reported the same updates still being available). Maybe that caused my system to break? I thought GNOME Software was a safe way to apply updates…
I guess I could try reinstalling my system, but I’m expectedly not a bit thrilled about that - while it might fix the screen freezing, I’m not too sure I can figure out a way to get around the blurry fonts and Qt apps breaking. I know it’s petty, but I care about consistency in my desktop. If I can’t get the Wayland session to work, I’ll probably go back to the Cinnamon spin…