The actual community boards and such are independent of Red Hat otherwise.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to add in the main post that I’ve researched that too. I know about FESCo and I understand what you’re saying about it being kind of a counter-weight to Red Hat. But there is a pretty big problem:

Out of 9 current FESCo board members, 6 are Red Hat employees, one of them is an ex-Red Hat employee, which leaves only 2 members that are not affiliated with Red Hat. Now, I understand that there’s probably not some big conspiracy there, I assume it’s just that their job at RH allows them to work on Fedora a lot more than anyone else, and in turn, they’re chosen for the board because their contributions will usually be very noticeable. But at the end of the day, I think there is a conflict of interest there. When faced with a heavy choice, do you stand with your employer who puts food on your table or a community of strangers that doesn’t really give you real life benefits?

At the end of the day, Nobara is pretty much a one-man hobby project. Sure, there is a small community around it nowadays but even then, if the main developer decides to drop it, they’d have hard time keeping up. That’s why I’m usually hesitant to recommend these types of distributions and I’d rather recommend something tried and tested with a big community build over many years.

For me it’s pretty simple:
-older hardware/no need for up to date packages - Debian
-new hardware, needs up-to-date software - Arch
And that’s it. Though obviously, you can also use flatpak if you truly need newer versions of software. Personally I have arch on my gaming PC + Debian on my multimedia-consumption laptop.