MAC MINI with Apple M2 PRO - loaded sonoma and it's a disaster.

I'm sure more people will chime in but the first thing I see is Avast. As a first step, uninstall that per their instructions either by procedure or by uninstaller. Which ever one they offer. That is likely causing much of the slow or otherwise bad macOS performance.

I can’t go through the whole report now but right off the bat I can see two things that could be causing trouble: memory cleaner and avast.

”cleaning” ir “purging” memory goes against how macOS manages memory. The OS tries to use as much memory as possible by caching stuff to make it readily available. No purging programs should be used in any version since 10.9 Mavericks.

”Antivirus” offer no protection and cause serious performance problems for zero benefit. See

Effective defenses against malware and other threats: hhttps://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-8841

I will look at the whole report and will let you know what else I can see.

If it was a disaster in 14.0, it is no surprise it is still a disaster in 14.1.

For most people, Sonoma is quite stable. Most problems are usually due to whatever was there, sometimes for many iterations of the OS.

If you want us other users to try and help, we need information to ascertain what may be likely to be causing trouble. Please run Etrecheck and post its full report here. Use the "additional text" button and paste the report into the text box.

Remove Avast, the memory cleaner, and the Avast VPN, as was mentioned above.

Once that’s all gone, check for updates to the HP apps, too.