Fedora 44, KDE Plasma, Wayland session. Simple thing, holding a key down.

7777777777777777777

Except it wasn’t doing that anymore. Hold 7, get one 7, and instead of it repeating I’d get a little popup underneath the cursor with a handful of characters sitting in it. Looked exactly like one of those mobile long-press accent menus.

Checked System Settings → Input Devices → Keyboard → Key repeat. All fine, delay and rate both set correctly. Tried the Test area right there in Settings, same thing happened, single character then that popup. Tried it in a terminal, tried it in the browser, tried it in an editor. Everywhere. Not one app misbehaving, the whole session.

First guess was a Wayland/KWin session-level bug. Wrong guess.

what it actually was

That popup wasn’t an accent picker. It was IBus’s candidate window.

Somewhere along the line, IBus Wayland had ended up set as the active virtual keyboard under Plasma. The second IBus is sitting in that role on Wayland, it grabs the held key as an input-method event instead of letting KWin pass it straight through for normal repeat. Instead of the key repeating, you get an IBus candidate popup, which looks exactly like a dead keyboard if you don’t already know what you’re staring at.

Not a one-off either. Same thing bites other people on Plasma 6 Wayland, arrows, enter, backspace, whatever, the moment IBus Wayland is the active virtual keyboard.

the fix

System Settings → Input Devices → Virtual Keyboard

Set to IBus Wayland → switch it to None, or grab Fcitx5 and switch to that instead. Fcitx5 doesn’t carry this bug. Newer Plasma builds also ship a native Plasma Keyboard option now, pick that if it’s there, sidesteps the whole mess.

Check it’s actually gone afterward:

systemctl --user status ibus-daemon

Still running and you don’t need it, no CJK or complex input methods in play, kill it:

systemctl --user disable --now ibus-daemon

Worth a check too whether it snuck in as a dependency of something else entirely:

dnf list installed | grep ibus

takeaway

Nothing wrong with the GPU driver, KWin, or the repeat settings themselves, this was an input method grabbing the key event before repeat ever got a look in. Fedora KDE, Wayland, repeat suddenly dies with a weird little popup standing in for it, check Virtual Keyboard before chasing anything else.