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I have a Lenovo Ideapad 3i gaming that I bought about a year before I decided to switch to linux full time. The laptop has an 11th gen Intel i5 cpu and an Nvidia gtx 1650 as a dedicated card. The laptop is fine, it has a decent screen, okay keyboard, a decent amount of storage, and decent performance for an $800 laptop 2 years ago. The problem with running linux on it is the Nvidia card.
When I first installed linux to it I chose PopOS because it has very good support for Nvidia laptops as System76 makes laptops with Nvidia cards. Don't get me wrong, PopOS is a fine distro for most people, but the whole thing just feels bloated. System76's decision to make flatpak a major part of the os would be fine, if flatpaks didn't take up so much space. After a few months of normal use flatpaks were taking up close to 35 gigs of space on my hard drive. I looked around for an alternative distro that wouldn't have dozens of gigabytes of bloat and found Nobara.
Nobara is based off of Fedora, which I don't have much experience with. The main difference between base Fedora and Nobara is that Nobara has lots of little tweaks to make gaming and installing drivers easier. Setting up Nobara for my laptop was actually really easy. All it took to get the Nvidia card working was just installing the latest driver and then installing EnvyControl to be able to switch from the integrated card to the Nvidia one and back.
The desktop that I chose is the KDE edition which is just stock KDE. Most of the extra gaming software was stuff I was going to install anyway, so the default install does not feel too bloated for my use case, but your milage may vary. For some reason their modified version of steam did not work at all, so I just used the flatpak version. I don't know whether it is because of Nvidia or Nobara, but the system will sometimes freeze when doing stuff with flatpak. I have no idea why it happens, but it's not too often.
Overall, Nobara is a very solid distro that I think I will keep using. 8/10 because of the freezes.
I have been using Debian on various machines since about Debian 8 which came out in 2015. The transition from 11 to 12 on my Thinkpad T420 was super smooth, I just had to change the repo names and download the new packages. There's not much in the new release that really changes my experience, it just seems like some updated libraries and other packages that improve hardware support. I have never had Debian break on its own and Debian 12 is no exception. Just a super solid experience that remains stable. 10/10.