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?
I know this is not really answering your question but I use yakuake on KDE, which is a drop-down terminal, and it uses F12 as the shortcut to open. Very fast, no hassle. Depending on how you set it up you can exit by F12 again, or it will hide when it loses focus i.e. you click somewhere outside of it.
I used to use Yakuake but realized I don’t always want a terminal. In fact, most of the time I do not want a terminal and if I do, I want it at a specific location. So most of the time I use the start->typing thing for firefox, steam, blender, and sometimes terminals that I am just going to use to run system-wide commands in.