Kernel 6.11 has been super buggy for me. About 3 weeks ago Nobara rolled out that kernel if I’m not mistaken. Do you still have a 6.10 grub option to try out? Since the live usb works that could be the issue.
If all your boot entries are 6.11, boot into the oldest and downgrade that
You could use ProjectLibre although it might be overkill
How would BangleJs be worse in terms of privacy? You can run both with gadgetbridge, so no cloud data necessary.
What’s your field of work? I work in IT and really try to find some day to day use cases where AI might help and I just don’t seem to find any. The odd presentation or maybe a sprint review protocol, but nothing recurring or anything that feels game changing.
I think the nobara updater works with yum. You should be able to access to the yum update history and find out what audio related packages got installed in the update and downgrade those. Anything with pipewire or alsa in the package name for example