The problem
This is apparently a video driver problem. The person who asked the question linked in the comment submitted a bug report: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/issues/110327
However, that bug was closed with a somewhat confusing response:
Listed this report from #76428 however nouveau drivers are known to have many limitations compared with NVidia's drivers.
Closing this report as NVidia's drivers having poor (even broken) Wayland support is also out of our control.
So apparently neither the nouveau driver nor the proprietary alternative driver work. The reporter of this problem provided a useful summary of the current state of affairs:
After trying out the proprietary driver, the issue does not occur! However; pretty much everything else surrounding blender breaks. Most wayland compositors straight up refuse to boot off of nvidia instead of nouveau. I got Plasma to work with nvidia and tested it that way; but everything was so slow that it was basically unusable. (There were 3 seconds between me moving my mouse and it updating on screen).
So while Blender might work better with proprietary drivers, wayland seems to very much not; or so says my experience.
So users of NVidia cards under Linux seem to have a problem until either the open source nouveau driver or the proprietary NVidia are improved.
Solution
One way to get it to work is suggested in the troubleshooting section of the Blender documentation website. This is what worked for me to start Blender from the command line:
WAYLAND_DISPLAY="" blender
That has the effect of disabling Wayland (and some associated features such as smooth scrolling for trackpad input) but allows Blender to run without the distracting backgrounds of other running applications.