Thanks, I guess it was ksysguard what I saw eating CPU in Q4OS.

I tried CachyOS Plasma live yesterday, it ran so much lighter! Idling at ~1%, that's basically the same as my current (fully riced) Openbox system.

However, the live system is very barebones.

I researched CachyOS and I approve so far. Even the ArchLinux community doesn't seem to hate on it. Have to boot it up again and sniff around under the hood.

This might just be my stepping stone back to a fully fledged DE.