I have an interesting situation: I have two Dell XPS 15 laptops, one has a 4K screen and 12th Gen i7 CPU, the other a 1920x1200 screen and a 13th gen i7 CPU. I’m running Fedora with KDE on Wayland (everywhere). Recently (about a week or so ago)I updated F42 on both machines: on the 12th Gen the Plasma Z-ordering became inverted: I open a new window and it goes to the bottom of the stack. The 13th Gen machine got the same update and the behavior has remained normal.
I got irritated with the 12th Gen machine behavior and just now updated to F43 hoping that the glitch would be magically rectified. It isn’t. Fairly unsurprisingly, the behavior is the same.
I’ve not updated the 13th Gen machine to F43 yet, but I’m not anticipating any issues when I do (upgrade went smoothly on 12th Gen, except for the aforementioned plasma issue).
The 12th Gen machine is mainly using the Iris Xe iGPU. It also has a 3050 GPU. The 13th Gen is also mainly using its iGPU but has an Intel Arc A370 onboard.
I didn’t see any other reports about this. Is it a known issue? (Actually I’ve not yet searched the wider web. Now I have: Gemini is not much help, only noting that is has happened before.)
This might not be the proper forum - I’m assuming KDE is the right place to do - but since the behavior started with a Fedora update I thought I’d try here first.
Edit: I just noticed that this behavior is not exhibited by Chrome (on which I had to turn off h/w acceleration some time ago). It’s mostly happening with Firefox, but also other programs; not Konsole though. I have 33 windows on the go and hundreds of tabs. I have a load of Chrome windows and tabs open across sessions also, but far fewer than Firefox. So it could be a combo of Firefox + Plasma + having tons of windows and tabs restored on startup. I just tested in another account on the same machine with fewer FF windows and tabs open, and the inverted Z-order was not exhibited.
There’s evidently something specific to my usage pattern in my main account that’s not replicated elsewhere on the same machine. It may be a bug but if it is it’s not something that’s affecting others, nor even other accounts on this same machine. I’ll mark as Solved, even though it really isn’t.