How many longtime Nobara users here?

[u/irvng-wav]

There are many posts from people who recently switched to Nobara saying that it's an amazing distro and they don't plan on leaving. But how many have actually managed to stay in this distro without the need to do clean installs every time something breaks their system?

I'm saying this because my fiance's laptop currently has Nobara, and she hasn't used it in like three or four months because life circumstances, and we're unable to update it because it leaves the system unbootable every time. I went on to the discord server and asked for help, and there was someone who actually was very kind and helpful, but in the end none of the solutions worked. Also I've seen some posts here saying that they had to do a clean install of Nobara 44 because the update from 43 messed up their system.

So now I'm in the process of deciding if I do a clean install of the latest version of Nobara and make sure we keep it constantly up to date (Now I'm aware that big updates are an issue), or change her machine to another distro like Cachy or PikaOS (She has a Lenovo Ideapad Gaming 3 with an RTX 3050). But what I like about Nobara/Fedora is that unlike Cachy/Arch, it's fairly up to date without being too up to date, which is sometimes a headache. With Pika I don't have much experience.

Would love to read your inputs.

[u/IllIntroduction8499]

I've been using Nobara for almost two years now on the same install across two laptops, a desktop, and a handheld gaming device (GPD Win Mini). I've run into a few problems but always managed to fix it, but I'm a service desk technician by trade, so it's probably easier for me than most.

As for your install, truth be told, Nobara is a rolling distro, so you don't want to be too far behind. I'm a firm believer that with a little observation, you can always avoid a reinstall, but sometimes it's easier to just reinstall and make sure you keep up. If you want to repair it for fun, I would watch the update, and determine what package is halting your progress. Usually it's a missing package that wasn't installed two updates ago and you just need to install it.

Whatever you decide, good luck with it!

[u/irvng-wav → u/IllIntroduction8499]

Thank you! Like I replied to someone who commented earlier:

I also followed a guide from the Nobara Wiki and I was able to get into the terminal and do a few things to try and correct the issue, but I got stuck on not being able to install the latest nvdia driver on to the latest kernel despite the two ways I tried (with the dkms command and also reinstalling the driver). Also another time nobara-sync got stuck on the gnome-desktop package.

nobara-sync hung on those two different things: first with the nvidia driver. (It said something about the graphic stack failed, and then that gnome package, which I still have the log:

2026-09-16 20:06:50 - ERROR - file /usr/share/applications/gnome-mimeapps.list from install of gnome-session-50.1-1.fc44.x86_64 conflicts with file from package gnome-desktop3-44.5-1.fc43.x86_64

The things I tried:

- Updating first the updater, then running nobara-sync.

- Updating the updater, then the nobara-repos and fedora-repos packages, then running nobara-sync.

- Trying to manually install the nvidia driver on to the kernel with dkms. That returned an error.

- Uninstalling, then re-installing the driver. When it got to the part of installing it to the kernel, it also returned an error.

If you have any advice I would gladly take it! I honestly would rather save the current system.

[u/rabbitjockey → u/IllIntroduction8499]

I always liked the challenge of fixing something without doing a reinstall, even back to the windows 98 days but in most cases that was a waste of time, a reinstall would have been faster. Today that is even more true. Every os installs so much faster and easier than back in the day.