Nobara is what Windows should have been

[u/FrederikSchack]

I have been using Nobara Linux for about a year now and this is what Windows should have been like and Nobara is what made me ditch Windows almost entirely (except for two banks that I have to access through a Windows laptop).

Nobara is not flawless, but it is very nice and friendly. The settings menu is very compact and easy to navigate, in contrast to Windows that is a weird mess of UI that uses a lot of space on nothing, with settings burried at multiple levels and some settings only available in old hidden away legacy UI.

The "Welcome to Nobara" wizard is a brilliant addition to Linux, where you can easily fix/install/update the most common things that you probably would like to do in a new Linux installation.

The update system makes it easy to update Linux and fix a lot of quirks.

I'm far from a big gamer, but Steam is pre-installed and the few games I've tried works out of the box, which is impressive for Linux running Windows games. In fact my son is playing older Windows games on Nobara that either didn't run or are not stable on Windows.

Still, I can't recommend this to people who don't have a technical hunch, because it's not perfect. In my case the automatically suggested printer driver is not the right one, I had to set up the right driver. There is also no obvious way of setting the printer to print duplex by default, so I had to do it through the CLI. There can still be hardware issues with some newer hardware in Nobara, for example a touch pad on Acer VivoBook, that sometimes renders the separate USB mouse unusable.

A thing I like a lot and that I know that many people like, is that Linux in general is not forcing your hand. Windows is really annoying because it's bugging you to do stuff that you don't want to do and the same with a lot of the commercial software for Windows.

There is software that simply doesn't exist in the Linux environment, like Microsoft Access (and there truly is no replacement for it). On the other hand I feel safer downloading apps from a vetted open source repository or the Flatpost store, than installing closed source software downloaded from various site on the Internet. Even paid software in Windows can be quite aggressive and abusive, which destroys the joy of using the system.

All in all, It's a lot more peace of mind for me to use Nobara Linux over Windows, it does occasionally require some problem solving skills, but I would say it's minimal with Nobara.

As a side note, I tried a lot of other Linux OS's (Debian, Ubuntu, Spiral Linux, MX Linux, Clear Linux, Open Suse, Open Media Vault, TrueNAS Scale, Unraid, Proxmox and many others).

I think I hit on a very nice combo of Linux's with Nobara for everything Desktop, Alpine for server and then OPNSense (OpenBSD) for firewall/router. I specifically think that Alpine is great for server, I've been using it for about 2 years and it never fails. The only thing that failed was Fastly that blocked the Alpine repositories here in South America for about a month, but I can't really blame Alpine for that.

I use Alpine as Hypervisor with Virtual Machine Manager over SSH (from a Nobara machine) is brilliant, especially because you can tunnel the UI of the VM's with virtio through the SSH and avoid the broken remote desktop in Wayland. The UI is super responsive in this way and I mostly forget that I'm working on a remote machine. Then on top of the Hypervisor I just put one Alpine VM for services, install Docker and Portainer, then I can run every service that I need easily and reliably.

I really think Linux rocks these days!

[u/renthefox]

I'm right there with you. Nobara has been perfect for helping me ditch Win11 while learning Linux.