Yes, I have 'reduce transparency' set to true. Overnight after upgrade the UI became noticably sluggish.
The outstanding example is Spotlight. For years since the M1 release I have been able to bring the bar up and type C-H-R then Enter, in ~500ms I guess, and I would always get Chrome.
Now, I have to wait another 1-2 seconds for it to think. If I hit enter before it has finished thinking, Spotlight goes away and nothing else happens!
The UI and Spotlight are still fine on my 2020 M1 Air running Sequioa
Fair enough. With Tahoe's removal of Launchpad, I assume you're talking about Spotlight in the sense of what appears when you press the Launchpad icon (F4)? Anyway, I can confirm that I also get very weird laggy behaviour from it—sometimes a double-press is interpreted as two presses, sometimes as just one.
I hadn't noticed that they killed Launchpad! On my M3's keyboard, F4 is a magnifying glass icon for Spotlight. I've always used cmd+space, which has been around for a while.
What's even worse is I have disabled all search categories for Spotlight except Apps and System Settings. It's searching a list of 40 apps and idk maybe 200 settings, and it still sucks.
I also never had a problem launching apps from Launchpad (I guess because that was its sole purpose, and it did it well) while I think it was pretty much day 1 that I encountered an app that just refused to show up in the Spotlight replacement.
The outstanding example is Spotlight. For years since the M1 release I have been able to bring the bar up and type C-H-R then Enter, in ~500ms I guess, and I would always get Chrome.
Now, I have to wait another 1-2 seconds for it to think. If I hit enter before it has finished thinking, Spotlight goes away and nothing else happens!
The UI and Spotlight are still fine on my 2020 M1 Air running Sequioa