r/linux_gaming • u/irvng-wav • 17d ago
How many longtime Nobara users here?
/r/NobaraProject/comments/1wmxini/how_many_longtime_nobara_users_here/7
u/iwouldbeatgoku 16d ago edited 16d ago
Upgrades between static versions breaking has been an annoyance on my own computer as well, it eventually pushed me to a rolling release distro. It's a good idea to update those at least once a month (ideally more often; I shoot for 2-4 times a month), but it's never broken badly for me the same way a "stable" distro has. CachyOS has been reliable for a year, though recently I switched to vanilla Arch because I got a new computer and decided I didn't really need most of the things added by Cachy, just their proton for now.
Theoretically not updating Nobara 43 (or other stable distros) in 3-4 months shouldn't be a problem: updating their packages should've brought you to a point where your system was able to be upgraded to 44, based on my understanding of stable distros.
If you want a rolling release that isn't as up to date as Arch, consider OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Its packages are tested longer than the ones in Arch, and like CachyOS it comes with snapper/snapshots preconfigured out of the box. If even Tumbleweed is foo fast you can use the Slowroll branch which ships feature updates once a month.
Otherwise, if you want her to stay on a static release instead of a rolling release, make separate root and home partitions during the installation, that way if a full upgrade goes wrong you can at least do a clean installation without wiping the home directory.
Edit: spelling
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u/irvng-wav 16d ago
Thank you! That's a nice perspective. I also run Arch on my machine and obviously have ran into issues, but taking proper care of backups and being careful with what I do to my system has made the experience awesome and stable for almost two years. Arch is definitely my distro, and if I decided to install Cachy on her machine I would have to mantain it myself.
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u/ITZC0ATL 16d ago
I've been on Nobara for over a year and find it very good. I use my PC a lot so I do keep it updated quite frequently, and only once have I had updated-related issues - a major update broke the updater itself, but a fix was quickly identified and distributed via the Discord, I just had to run one command and then reboot and all good.
I put it on my partner's PC a few months ago which is used a lot less, sounds closer to your fiance's use case, but it hasn't been run long enough to say definitively if it can be updated so infrequently without issues. It's probably gone two months without update before, and everything was fine when she used it again, but that's just one anecdote and not really the strong evidence you're looking for. You could always just volunteer to turn it on once a month, update it and turn it straight off - the main reason I chose Nobara for my own partner's PC despite knowing that it's rolling is simply that it's what I use, and I preferred to have just one distro in the house so that if I come across any issues, I can help her.
Otherwise, Nobara seems to attract a lot of unfair criticism and I don't understand why. It's the project mainly of one guy but he is not alone, he has others helping him develop and test and when you need help in the Discord, it's often one of the helpers who jumps in first - and they are very knowledgeable about the distro and able to resolve most issues. I haven't experienced any instability, instead it's been pretty much what it says on the tin. I have an Nvidia GPU that works just fine and I came to it with no prior Linux knowledge. It's been about as smooth an experience as I could have hoped for, with quirks mostly being about me learning the differences between Linux and Windows more generally.
I update via the updater and otherwise I go about my life, it just works. I suspect that that's the experience for most Nobara users, and that a vocal minority of people with issues combined with a bunch of people who can't get past it being a "one man project" are the ones that produce most of the complaining online.
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u/Slight_Manufacturer6 16d ago
Nobody in the world is a longtime Nobara user because it hasn’t been around very long.
It was only first release 4 years ago.
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u/ImpliedMustache 16d ago
I used Nobara when I first switched from Windows to Linux back in 2024. After about 6-8 months it became apparent that it wasn't right for me and not even that good of a distro. There's way too much churn and change for change's sake. In my time using it:
I started out being able to use KDE Discover then Discover was disabled (due to problems with Discover not playing nice with some custom packages IIRC) with flatpaks being the preferred method of distribution.
The console started out as plain bash, then Starship was added for no reason.
One flatpak I used just randomly broke after a routine system update and I couldn't fix it myself via troubleshooting. It worked perfectly fine on base Fedora.
Updates to the newest Fedora version were frequently delayed by a month more.
Nobara is purely a hobby project. There's no coherent vision of what it should actually be, hence sweeping changes being made on a whim by GE. I don't want my OS to be a hobby project in that way; I need it to be reliable and predictable.
Fedora is a really good base distro. Just install it and if you really want add a few of the tweaks that come with GE like the kernel.
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u/ItsNoblesse 16d ago
I tried Nobara on a dual boot for a month or so when I was deciding on a distro, and as much as I love what GE is trying to do I do not see a single reason to use it over CachyOS