at this point, I'm ready to abandon it and switch to gnome because holy hell this has been a huge clusterfuck
Discussion
What distro are you running? Fedora?
Debain 13.
And the main repos for Debian 13 has this mixture of KDE 5 and 6, and I think that's partially what's causing the problem, because my system settings looks like it's on version 5, and yet most of the modules installed are from version 6, and they can't see each other or talk to each other.
Understood. I have never been burned with GNOME, and I also prefer it—purist style—as it's integrated into Fedora.
I cannot have my daily driver braking like this on updates. 😅