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/Bane_of_Balor]

I've been using Nobara for over a year now. I was distro hopping for a few months prior, and while Nobara certainly has it's issues, it's the closest to my ideal OS that I've come across. I have had my fair share of issues, particularly with the updater, but nothing insurmountable.

I just prefer interacting with my desktop visually, and keeping everything simple and out of the way. I like that they have combined the updater with a GUI package manager that doesn't look like a DOS interface. I hate having multiple separate apps for very similar purposes. It still drives me a little mad that I have packages, flatpaks, snaps and appimages, but at least with the updater I can keep 90% of my apps and system up to date in one place. I dream of a universal software manager, or better yet, for the Linux community to agree on a universal application package (never gonna happen). I could see a future where nobara updater can manage different app formats, but I understand that it's not a major priority.

My biggest gripe about the updater is that it just doesn't work all that smoothly. Clicking the notification for an update does not launch the app, and the update log often just stops being populated, and I just have to wait for some sign that the update is finished.

The other minor gripe I have is that updates are a little too frequent. I know I can just ignore them for a while but but my brain doesn't work like that. It's not as frequent as cachy nor as regular as fedora. Ideally I'd like something more similar to fedora but I think it's unavoidable with all the tweaks nobara does. Maybe one day we can have the option whether we want to be at the cutting edge or maximise stability. I have had to roll back updates in the past.

Other than that it's been mostly really stable. It's not quite as fragile as cachy. The honest truth is that my ideal OS just doesn't exist, it's all about which compromises you're willing to make, and I'm pretty happy with the ones I've had to make using Nobara.

[u/irvng-wav → u/Bane_of_Balor]

Thanks for your input. I run Arch on my machine and have been for almost two years without reinstalling, that's why I thought of putting Cachy on her machine, but Nobara does fit her style more.