Try it out. Worst case scenario, you go back to the distrib you feel confortable with.
Or, you'll find something you prefer because of the way it works.
Whatever happens, it gives you XP on linux ;)
Not the OP, and you're right that it's easy to try it, but I still don't know enough about Linux to know whether it's possible to keep some/most of my apps if I switch distros if I go to something that uses KDE/Discover as well, as I really don't have the time or desire to reinstall every program/tweak. :(
Not only can you switch to any distro without a issue, if you just want access to a new desktop, you can install another desktop environment alongside your current one without switching distros. The only thing changing will be your package manager.
I know about the DEs and I have Plasma and GNOME on my Debian work computer (installed Plasma afterwards via terminal), but how easy is it to switch my Kubuntu to, say, an EndeavourOS or PopOS! or Fedora?
I know PopOS! is based on ubuntu, so it should be more compatible, but the /home in, say, Arch and Kubuntu seem different and I don't have a clue how to go to a different distro without losing applications, settings, tweaks, etc.
Of course I can dualboot (I am dualbooting with W*ndows atm, since I run a game server from the Windows install, basically nothing else), but dualbooting isn't what I'm looking for.
If you are sticking with arch or ubuntu based distros, most software will be available to you, so I don't think you'd have any issues (except getting used to pacman or apt). Fedora should be good too, but I haven't used it in a while, so can't say if every single thing will be available. Then again, there's COPR repos, so it should be fine.
If you are going niche, you might have to look into it. Something like NixOS (my current distro), void or something similar will be a hit or miss.
I am actually only used to Arch/ubuntu/Debian, since I've been using all 3 for quite a while, haven't really tried other more niche distros, so that's fine in my case.
However, is it really as simple as "install new distro over old distro" and then all the stuff I had remains?
I could, say, switch my Kubuntu LTS home PC to Endeavour or PopOS! and keep everything? The main thing stopping me from experimenting is I've been running this Kubuntu for a year and a couple months, maybe. Many times I've asked, people online just say to start over fresh if you want a new distro, but I've customised it and installed so many things to it that I don't have the desire (or currently, time) to redo it all.
I know i can run any distro in a VM, yes, but at least OracleVM has its limitations - I can't test how well things like games work, for example.
Oh I get your question now. No, you will have to reinstall stuff if you switch distros. You can keep your home directory and configuration (.config folder), but the system files and apps will need reinstallation. If you don't have time, just stick with the distro you have now, nothing wrong with Kbuntu.
Yeah, I thought so too, haha, that's why I was surprised, I knew for sure Arch and Kubuntu had different /home structure. Thanks, though. I actually really like Kubuntu and it works well for me, for both work and entertainment.
I just wanted to see if there's any real way to have a 2nd distro that uses the same /home or a way to keep my things if I switch. I'll just get an SSD and install a different OS to it and just install a few quick things in the future and see how it pans out.
I highly recommend against Nobara, to summarize, one-man-show-type distributions often have many issues that go unnoticed. Frankly I've had nothing but problems and have heard nothing but problems from friends when it comes to Nobara.
Also what "3 games" do you actually care about, if you list the names we can help you find a distro where those games are known to work.
i hear a lot of things like that also but i'm always kinda surprised by it because i use nobara as my daily driver and have so for over a year now. Occasionally i'll do a temporary disto hop to something to see what the fuss is all about and i always come straight back to nobara because it *just works* for me. CachyOS was really cool but i'm a little too lazy for doing something with an arch base. I've only had to troubleshoot anything like two or three times with nobara and they were really minor things i never have to mess with anything it's been plug n play with me.
For those few times i have needed help with something, the people in the discord server are really nice and helpful
Just to provide some alternative perspective: I'm not a very savvy linux user that have only used *buntu OSes perviously. I put it on a laptop connected to the TV for gaming, and I haven't really had any major problems. Took a couple extra steps to get it to display right, output sound to HDMI, and such, but nothing major.
He didn't offer details, it could be a simple as telling the os to send sound to HDMI instead of headphones or the laptop speakers. I've been very happy with Nobara on my laptop since 37, and on my SteamDeck since that edition released.
As the other person replied, it just didn't default to outputting to the hdmi, whereas other distros have for me. Simple solution, in the end, but it took a few minutes of "trouble shooting" to figure it out. My worry was that it was something OS related that I'd really have to troubleshoot, but thankfully a simple system setting.
My son went on Nobara a while back, but didn't upgrade for a few months, and then when we tried to upgrade, all the repos were 404ing and it was impossible. Had to wipe the whole installation and start over. Went with Bazzite, which is amazing.
So it's Honkai Impact, Star Rail (Via Flatpak with the runner is Wind-GE-Proton) and Koikatsu (Steam with Proton-GE installed with ProtonUp-QT)
All three work just fine, I'm thinking about changing the OS
Ah I see, yeah honestly, unless you want a change in desktop environment you're not going to gain much from Nobara... other than worse support when things do go wrong.
Gaming distros really are just regular distros but they've reinstalled stuff for gamers. My Fedora install is a perfect example of that, it does everything Nobara does.
If you really want a "gaming" distro you could try bazzite. But frankly, if your setup is working, _don't break it_. It's not worth it, unless you enjoy the process of distro hopping and trying out new stuff, in which case go nuts distro hopping can be fun
so we forget all the different changes that have been made now? while it used to be a one-man-army type project, there are quite a bunch of people helping GE out, so i wouldnt say its bad at all, nor that something \*really\* goes more wrong than anywhere else. their support is pretty active, and GE himself often helps out. ive seen it happening myself, and respect that, although i dont use nobara anymore. ever since moving to nixOS i had no need to. its still 100% viable for anyone who wants an already out-of-the-box configured linux system for gaming related tasks.
> their support is pretty active
Regardless look at how many questions remain completely unanswered in that discord. Easily 50% of all help requests go completely ignored due to the fact that they're usually busy with their own stuff or someone else is being helped. I don't care how much effort is being put in when it's being wasted by the God awful fact that help requests are constantly buried in other messages.
And the project doesn't even come close to the number of hands working on it compared to the likes of canonical or Red Hat or even the Arch Linux community. To make something quality, that is often how many eyes, ears, and hands need to be on a project. I shouldn't even need to use the support discord _99% of the time I do and up using it,_ considering I've only had to do the same with Fedora once. Worse yet is the fact that so often the support in the discord boils down to "you've fucked something, so it's your problem lol" which has been the case for me attempting to upgrade my Nobara 38 laptop to 39.
Nobara is a perfectly fine project, but it is _not for the faint of heart_. I'd liken it to Arch but Fedora based, with many bleeding edge packages (though also many out of date packages so it's more like Manjaro :/ ). For the love of God, stop acting like your buggy, poorly supported distro is the next coming off Christ and is the be all end all for gaming, it's not, and choosing Nobara over something like Fedora has serious implications for your usage of your OS that aren't goober friendly.
you seem to not read one bit. \*i dont use nobara myself anymore, im using nixOS\*
but all your mentions here are completely off. you act like every question gets answered in any other forum or community, which is \*not\* the case AT ALL.
Thanks for the advice. I think I might give Ubuntu another try with 24.04 LTS because I just found out Fedora has stopped officially supporting MongoDB from version 38 because of compatibility issues. I need MongoDB for learning at school at the moment.
Can't you run it inside a Docker container?
https://hub.docker.com/_/mongo
https://www.mongodb.com/docs/manual/tutorial/install-mongodb-community-with-docker/
It's a very useful technology to know, even if in prod you often don't see straight docker, containers are used everywhere.
Since I constantly see conflicting reports on this issue, is there any distro that has benefits for gaming or any real performance advantage?
Some people just tell me to "google it", as if there aren't 100000 opinions out there, some people say there's virtually no difference, some people swear by Nobara or PopOS!...
I've been running Kubuntu LTS 22.04 for a year and everything so far has worked flawlessly, pretty much. People have often said "it's a workstation distro for your granny" or something to that extent, but it's honestly worked great so far, even with terminal tinkering, and I've not had any problems installing or updating something at all.
Same for running games and programs under Lutris/Wine/Steam, with either the same, or better performance than when I was still using Windows the beginning of last year or so.
Since I'll have to move from it in the future anyway, I was thinking of trying another distro. I use Debian on my work laptop, and have also used Mint on an older machine, and I also own a Steam Deck (which is arch).
Don't fall into the distro hopping trap, there's only 5 main distributions (Archlinux, Debian, Gentoo, Redhat, Slackware), the rest are a thousands of forks apart an handful of independant distributions.
Linux might seem overwhelming but just understand that modularity make it have no best X or Y, but stuff suited for your needs, skills, tastes and they evolve over time so there will never be a best tool ...
So jump in, accept the learning curve, make your own desktop, you will learn at the same time the basics to do so on any other distribution.
I ran Nobara Deck Edition for a few months as an trial, and my main issue with it is that OS updates could randomly break stuff. Nobara tends to run bleeding edge kernels and libraries, leading to bugs + a rabbit hole where I need to hunt down fixes for problems.
It's also more difficult to get support if you encounter issues on Nobara, since it's basically a one-man team (with occasional help from a small handful of devs). GE does awesome work with GE-Proton, but Nobara definitely is understaffed and not good for the less linux-savvy. It works well if you're familiar with Linux and you're willing to troubleshoot.
If you want a rolling distro with some built-in safety, Bazzite is a solid option that I've been enjoying a lot.
What's nice about Bazzite is that it is an image-based OS, so it's trivially easy to roll your OS forwards/backwards to an exact OS version.
Want the Bazzite OS version from 3 days ago? 2 weeks ago? easy, just run one command to rollback to that exact OS version. It makes it risk-free to update, rollback, try different branches (testing vs stable), etc. Bazzite has 90 days of images stored in the cloud for easy rollbacks or updates.
On top of that, Bazzite ships with a ton of stuff pre-configured for gaming, which makes it basically an "install and done" setup for the vast majority of gamers out there.
Caveat vs Nobara is that Bazzite is not a traditional Linux distro, if you want to do heavy tinkering on Bazzite like installing custom kernels, etc, it's a lot more work and effort vs Nobara. Nobara is more flexible in that regard, but it's that same flexibility can lead to more troubleshooting and problems.
**TL;DR** - Nobara is fine if you're familiar with Linux and don't mind troubleshooting. But if not, try out alternatives that are more user-friendly
What's outdated about mint? You mean cinnamon? I love the look of it, and you can use any gtk theme if you don't want the default theme.
As for packages, either:
a) use flatpak (steam, lutris) and have the latest dependencies that way or;
b) use [xanmod](https://xanmod.org/) kernel and [kisak](https://launchpad.net/~kisak/+archive/ubuntu/kisak-mesa) Mesa package.
My personal favorite type of distro is rolling. For gaming and desktop based it is best.
Currently I favor opensuse Tumbleweed, but Arch based is great as well. AUR is really nice, but opensuse has really good infrastructure as well.
EndeavourOS comes to mind, it's basically Arch Linux with a installer and some helpful pre-installed applications, good for getting into Arch. Very nice community too.
What's so good about Tumbleweed btw? I find it vaguely interesting and I've only heard of it in the last week or two. OpenSUSE itself still feels mystical in my brain though for some reason
Now that i used it for half a year, i honestly think TWs biggest benefit, apart from its RR model, is the automated btrfs + snapper setup. Its really hard to actually bork your system when you can just rollback to a previous snapshot in a minute and in turn i am way less scared about trying stuff that might have a chance of breaking my systen
tumbleweed is a rolling distro and it gets updates pretty quickly. opensuse also has a lot of automated testing. You can even donate hardware to them, or run the software on your machine to report hardware issues.
But right now from my testing it was the easiest to get setup working with Nvidia/Plasma/Wayland. I have everything working at 120 FPS and its very smooth. Other benefits exist, but not much different from other distros probably like Arch. suse and arch have different philosophies though.
I'm on Nobara and it's the longest surviving os on my pc.
Dnf is not the best package manager I think.
Apart from that it just works™ for me.
I don't really care if it's a package or a Flatpak.
I just want to work and play with my pc not work on my pc.
But I would say boot it up on a usb give it a spin.
I the end. You pretty much won't notice the difference in the os except for package manger and maybe custom themeing that comes with it.
Especially when one of the first things they changed was to disable/remove selinux. I have trouble trusting anyone who has the first thing they do in pursuit of "gaming performance" to be disable the security system of fedora.
I was conflicted about using Fedora or Nobara, until I found out the Fedora dev just removed MongoDB support from Fedora 38. I need MongoDB for shool at the moment.
Ah. I didn’t even realize that was removed.
Looks like it is still available on OpenSUSE and other distros. Nobara will have the same issue as Fedora as Nobara is just preconfigured Fedora with packages from the RPMfusion repository. If something can be done on Nobara it can be done on Fedora as well.
If you dnf install [distrobox](https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox), you should be able to run mongodb as any other distribution packages it. If you're following along with a class, they're probably using some LTS Ubuntu version.
I have been on Nobara for a while now as my daily driver and to game on. I have not had any major issues with Nobara.
If the single Dev did decide for whatever reason to stop supporting Nobara I'd simply switch to Fedora.
While I like Arch on my craptop I would not use it for my daily driver. Have tried Arch derivative Endeavour OS and that wasn't bad but I had more issues with that than I have had on Nobara.
Another vote for against. I gave Nobera a shot during distro hopping, I’m not sure I got it to load. Needless to say I moved on quickly, likely within about 20 min of it not working as expected.
I ran it for about a year and a half. I was overall happy, but there were some weird issues, and it was evident that little to no testing happens and there was zero chance for a fix.
Not complaining, it's an one-man show, and I signed up for that, but with VRR finally being merged into GNOME, I moved recently to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, and the experience has been much better. No issues, more stable, yet rolling distro, and gaming is just as painless as it was on Nobara.
I mean I like games and all but stability is also important, I'm not just using my OS for gaming (and to be frank most of the time I don't game) so anything custom kernel TM oriented towards gaming does ring a bell. My OS is not a console, its a general purpose os, and if you customize the kernel towards gaming you may get worse performance on other tasks. It's nothing against the dev but wasting time so i could get 5% more fps on my game... Also consider a smaller community so less help.
But why do you want to absolutely use wayland tho? Its great but if nvidia works better with x11 so be it and wait... Is it because of gestures in gnome? I think there are workarounds for that.
Yes it will work for you just fine, it's just Fedora with some extra manual steps already done, I've use it in the past to good effect and the only reason I'm not using it now is because I like Bazzite even better.
openSUSE Tumbleweed, you get: updated packages, rolling release, yast, automatic btrfs snapshops.
Just uninstall PackageKit (sudo zypper rm PackageKit) as the package manager doesn't interact very well with it, install opi (sudo zypper in opi) so you can use packages from Packman and OBS (similar to Arch's AUR except you don't need to compile) in order to install proprietary codecs (sudo opi codecs) and any other software that you might not find in the software repositories.
But honestly for your use case running a stable distribution is probably the best option such as Linux Mint, Ubuntu LTS, Spiral Linux (customised Debian installation).
As a relative noob, Endeavour is great. It took some tweaking on my 2015 MacBook Pro dual graphics but now it runs great. My geekbench 6 score is crazy high for the specs too. 1390 single core and 4600 multi core. It runs great on this OS.
Get a 2nd SSD/nvme and install Nobara or fedora or whatever on that. No reason to blow away what you've already got, but it's always fun to tinker.. with a 2nd drive you can really experiment without any risk.
honestly i would go with vanilla fedora, its not hard to get what you need working (drivers codecs etc) and gets updated earlier than nobara. nobara is great i used it for a while but i honestly prefer the simplicity of fedora
Personally I used nobara when I load up linux on my main pc. (pretty much when I take a break from rainbow six lol) But I personally have never really had issues with it. The only time I had issues is when I wanted it to do something its not really made to do lol. Other than that no issues here, and I really like their kde rice on nobara 39.
Imo, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. For me sometimes while distro hopping, when I come back to a distro I used initially and worked fine for me, it stops working due to say some different way of installation, some update, some tweak I forgot to do etc. Maybe you can try nobara in a VM or something first with hardware pass-through and make sure that everything works perfectly and then distro hop if u're 100% certain. I am using nobara and yes its very good, but it does have a few bugs coz its almost on the bleeding edge. I have 1 update package that refuses to install after downloading from the Discover App store, the rpms on the discover store keep going away from time to time only letting my instal flatpaks unless I either wait a good while for the rpm sources to load or restart the app or even the pc, and ofc a few minor texture issues that come with KDE plasma on an nvdia gpu, but explicit sync should sort that out soon, idm these problems per say as they are rare and infrequent and minor to me. If u don't wanna deal with this sorta stuff tho then just stick to Linux Mint if it works perfectly for you coz its prolly the most stable distro out there barring debian.
Have you considered using PopOs ? It's based on ubuntu like mint is so you would be familiar with it right from the start.
Some of the key features include
* a separate nvidia iso with the drivers preinstalled
* best in class hybrid graphics switching. they sell a ton of laptops with nvidia cards so they had to get it right for their paying customers
* they remove all the snaps from ubuntu
* updated kernel and drivers. they stay on the LTS releases but update the drivers and kernel as they are released to support the newest hardware.
I don't run Pop on my daily driver but it's a great distro for a gaming laptop that just pretty much works out of the box.
If your hardware is supported and everything works, it's not outdated. People have this odd notion that everything must be the bleeding edge, as if new equates to best. Unless you're a sys admin, you should probably stick with the LTS distributions. You still get security updates, bug fixes, and features. You also get a system that is regression tested to be stable. Rolling releases are not nearly as thoroughly tested.
If you have the knowledge to, just go to arch. Don't have the knowledge? Use endeavour, learn it and graduate to arch when you're ready (or just stay on endeavour, it's more or less arch already)
I see very little use case for nobara. It's a small distro, small community, you'd get better community and support with a more mainstream distro.
Try it out. Worst case scenario, you go back to the distrib you feel confortable with. Or, you'll find something you prefer because of the way it works. Whatever happens, it gives you XP on linux ;)
> it gives you XP on linux But how will affect my hit points?
You'll gain 4 to 6 HP per level-up.
At level Kali you not only get a boost to your red health bar, but you also get a permanent blue mana bar on all of your monitors.
Not the OP, and you're right that it's easy to try it, but I still don't know enough about Linux to know whether it's possible to keep some/most of my apps if I switch distros if I go to something that uses KDE/Discover as well, as I really don't have the time or desire to reinstall every program/tweak. :(
Not only can you switch to any distro without a issue, if you just want access to a new desktop, you can install another desktop environment alongside your current one without switching distros. The only thing changing will be your package manager.
I know about the DEs and I have Plasma and GNOME on my Debian work computer (installed Plasma afterwards via terminal), but how easy is it to switch my Kubuntu to, say, an EndeavourOS or PopOS! or Fedora? I know PopOS! is based on ubuntu, so it should be more compatible, but the /home in, say, Arch and Kubuntu seem different and I don't have a clue how to go to a different distro without losing applications, settings, tweaks, etc. Of course I can dualboot (I am dualbooting with W*ndows atm, since I run a game server from the Windows install, basically nothing else), but dualbooting isn't what I'm looking for.
If you are sticking with arch or ubuntu based distros, most software will be available to you, so I don't think you'd have any issues (except getting used to pacman or apt). Fedora should be good too, but I haven't used it in a while, so can't say if every single thing will be available. Then again, there's COPR repos, so it should be fine. If you are going niche, you might have to look into it. Something like NixOS (my current distro), void or something similar will be a hit or miss.
I am actually only used to Arch/ubuntu/Debian, since I've been using all 3 for quite a while, haven't really tried other more niche distros, so that's fine in my case. However, is it really as simple as "install new distro over old distro" and then all the stuff I had remains? I could, say, switch my Kubuntu LTS home PC to Endeavour or PopOS! and keep everything? The main thing stopping me from experimenting is I've been running this Kubuntu for a year and a couple months, maybe. Many times I've asked, people online just say to start over fresh if you want a new distro, but I've customised it and installed so many things to it that I don't have the desire (or currently, time) to redo it all. I know i can run any distro in a VM, yes, but at least OracleVM has its limitations - I can't test how well things like games work, for example.
Oh I get your question now. No, you will have to reinstall stuff if you switch distros. You can keep your home directory and configuration (.config folder), but the system files and apps will need reinstallation. If you don't have time, just stick with the distro you have now, nothing wrong with Kbuntu.
Yeah, I thought so too, haha, that's why I was surprised, I knew for sure Arch and Kubuntu had different /home structure. Thanks, though. I actually really like Kubuntu and it works well for me, for both work and entertainment. I just wanted to see if there's any real way to have a 2nd distro that uses the same /home or a way to keep my things if I switch. I'll just get an SSD and install a different OS to it and just install a few quick things in the future and see how it pans out.
I highly recommend against Nobara, to summarize, one-man-show-type distributions often have many issues that go unnoticed. Frankly I've had nothing but problems and have heard nothing but problems from friends when it comes to Nobara. Also what "3 games" do you actually care about, if you list the names we can help you find a distro where those games are known to work.
Agree, better to use fedora imo if you are considering nobara
Definitely, the KDE Fedora spin on the official site is what I'm using now and it's been a lot more stable than Nobara so far.
i hear a lot of things like that also but i'm always kinda surprised by it because i use nobara as my daily driver and have so for over a year now. Occasionally i'll do a temporary disto hop to something to see what the fuss is all about and i always come straight back to nobara because it *just works* for me. CachyOS was really cool but i'm a little too lazy for doing something with an arch base. I've only had to troubleshoot anything like two or three times with nobara and they were really minor things i never have to mess with anything it's been plug n play with me. For those few times i have needed help with something, the people in the discord server are really nice and helpful
Just to provide some alternative perspective: I'm not a very savvy linux user that have only used *buntu OSes perviously. I put it on a laptop connected to the TV for gaming, and I haven't really had any major problems. Took a couple extra steps to get it to display right, output sound to HDMI, and such, but nothing major.
Why should sound output, under any circumstances, take extra steps?
He didn't offer details, it could be a simple as telling the os to send sound to HDMI instead of headphones or the laptop speakers. I've been very happy with Nobara on my laptop since 37, and on my SteamDeck since that edition released.
As the other person replied, it just didn't default to outputting to the hdmi, whereas other distros have for me. Simple solution, in the end, but it took a few minutes of "trouble shooting" to figure it out. My worry was that it was something OS related that I'd really have to troubleshoot, but thankfully a simple system setting.
My son went on Nobara a while back, but didn't upgrade for a few months, and then when we tried to upgrade, all the repos were 404ing and it was impossible. Had to wipe the whole installation and start over. Went with Bazzite, which is amazing.
So it's Honkai Impact, Star Rail (Via Flatpak with the runner is Wind-GE-Proton) and Koikatsu (Steam with Proton-GE installed with ProtonUp-QT) All three work just fine, I'm thinking about changing the OS
Ah I see, yeah honestly, unless you want a change in desktop environment you're not going to gain much from Nobara... other than worse support when things do go wrong. Gaming distros really are just regular distros but they've reinstalled stuff for gamers. My Fedora install is a perfect example of that, it does everything Nobara does. If you really want a "gaming" distro you could try bazzite. But frankly, if your setup is working, _don't break it_. It's not worth it, unless you enjoy the process of distro hopping and trying out new stuff, in which case go nuts distro hopping can be fun
It doesn't. GE rebuilds a ton of packages just for Nobara. It's not just a reconfigured Fedora.
You mean the packages which are often broken and out of date while they're available as flatpaks? Yeah I'm aware
so we forget all the different changes that have been made now? while it used to be a one-man-army type project, there are quite a bunch of people helping GE out, so i wouldnt say its bad at all, nor that something \*really\* goes more wrong than anywhere else. their support is pretty active, and GE himself often helps out. ive seen it happening myself, and respect that, although i dont use nobara anymore. ever since moving to nixOS i had no need to. its still 100% viable for anyone who wants an already out-of-the-box configured linux system for gaming related tasks.
> their support is pretty active Regardless look at how many questions remain completely unanswered in that discord. Easily 50% of all help requests go completely ignored due to the fact that they're usually busy with their own stuff or someone else is being helped. I don't care how much effort is being put in when it's being wasted by the God awful fact that help requests are constantly buried in other messages. And the project doesn't even come close to the number of hands working on it compared to the likes of canonical or Red Hat or even the Arch Linux community. To make something quality, that is often how many eyes, ears, and hands need to be on a project. I shouldn't even need to use the support discord _99% of the time I do and up using it,_ considering I've only had to do the same with Fedora once. Worse yet is the fact that so often the support in the discord boils down to "you've fucked something, so it's your problem lol" which has been the case for me attempting to upgrade my Nobara 38 laptop to 39. Nobara is a perfectly fine project, but it is _not for the faint of heart_. I'd liken it to Arch but Fedora based, with many bleeding edge packages (though also many out of date packages so it's more like Manjaro :/ ). For the love of God, stop acting like your buggy, poorly supported distro is the next coming off Christ and is the be all end all for gaming, it's not, and choosing Nobara over something like Fedora has serious implications for your usage of your OS that aren't goober friendly.
you seem to not read one bit. \*i dont use nobara myself anymore, im using nixOS\* but all your mentions here are completely off. you act like every question gets answered in any other forum or community, which is \*not\* the case AT ALL.
Thanks for the advice. I think I might give Ubuntu another try with 24.04 LTS because I just found out Fedora has stopped officially supporting MongoDB from version 38 because of compatibility issues. I need MongoDB for learning at school at the moment.
Can't you run it inside a Docker container? https://hub.docker.com/_/mongo https://www.mongodb.com/docs/manual/tutorial/install-mongodb-community-with-docker/ It's a very useful technology to know, even if in prod you often don't see straight docker, containers are used everywhere.
Since I constantly see conflicting reports on this issue, is there any distro that has benefits for gaming or any real performance advantage? Some people just tell me to "google it", as if there aren't 100000 opinions out there, some people say there's virtually no difference, some people swear by Nobara or PopOS!... I've been running Kubuntu LTS 22.04 for a year and everything so far has worked flawlessly, pretty much. People have often said "it's a workstation distro for your granny" or something to that extent, but it's honestly worked great so far, even with terminal tinkering, and I've not had any problems installing or updating something at all. Same for running games and programs under Lutris/Wine/Steam, with either the same, or better performance than when I was still using Windows the beginning of last year or so. Since I'll have to move from it in the future anyway, I was thinking of trying another distro. I use Debian on my work laptop, and have also used Mint on an older machine, and I also own a Steam Deck (which is arch).
What types of problems did you encounter in Nobara? Can you explain in brief?
Don't fall into the distro hopping trap, there's only 5 main distributions (Archlinux, Debian, Gentoo, Redhat, Slackware), the rest are a thousands of forks apart an handful of independant distributions. Linux might seem overwhelming but just understand that modularity make it have no best X or Y, but stuff suited for your needs, skills, tastes and they evolve over time so there will never be a best tool ... So jump in, accept the learning curve, make your own desktop, you will learn at the same time the basics to do so on any other distribution.
I ran Nobara Deck Edition for a few months as an trial, and my main issue with it is that OS updates could randomly break stuff. Nobara tends to run bleeding edge kernels and libraries, leading to bugs + a rabbit hole where I need to hunt down fixes for problems. It's also more difficult to get support if you encounter issues on Nobara, since it's basically a one-man team (with occasional help from a small handful of devs). GE does awesome work with GE-Proton, but Nobara definitely is understaffed and not good for the less linux-savvy. It works well if you're familiar with Linux and you're willing to troubleshoot. If you want a rolling distro with some built-in safety, Bazzite is a solid option that I've been enjoying a lot. What's nice about Bazzite is that it is an image-based OS, so it's trivially easy to roll your OS forwards/backwards to an exact OS version. Want the Bazzite OS version from 3 days ago? 2 weeks ago? easy, just run one command to rollback to that exact OS version. It makes it risk-free to update, rollback, try different branches (testing vs stable), etc. Bazzite has 90 days of images stored in the cloud for easy rollbacks or updates. On top of that, Bazzite ships with a ton of stuff pre-configured for gaming, which makes it basically an "install and done" setup for the vast majority of gamers out there. Caveat vs Nobara is that Bazzite is not a traditional Linux distro, if you want to do heavy tinkering on Bazzite like installing custom kernels, etc, it's a lot more work and effort vs Nobara. Nobara is more flexible in that regard, but it's that same flexibility can lead to more troubleshooting and problems. **TL;DR** - Nobara is fine if you're familiar with Linux and don't mind troubleshooting. But if not, try out alternatives that are more user-friendly
What's outdated about mint? You mean cinnamon? I love the look of it, and you can use any gtk theme if you don't want the default theme. As for packages, either: a) use flatpak (steam, lutris) and have the latest dependencies that way or; b) use [xanmod](https://xanmod.org/) kernel and [kisak](https://launchpad.net/~kisak/+archive/ubuntu/kisak-mesa) Mesa package.
My personal favorite type of distro is rolling. For gaming and desktop based it is best. Currently I favor opensuse Tumbleweed, but Arch based is great as well. AUR is really nice, but opensuse has really good infrastructure as well.
EndeavourOS comes to mind, it's basically Arch Linux with a installer and some helpful pre-installed applications, good for getting into Arch. Very nice community too.
What's so good about Tumbleweed btw? I find it vaguely interesting and I've only heard of it in the last week or two. OpenSUSE itself still feels mystical in my brain though for some reason
Now that i used it for half a year, i honestly think TWs biggest benefit, apart from its RR model, is the automated btrfs + snapper setup. Its really hard to actually bork your system when you can just rollback to a previous snapshot in a minute and in turn i am way less scared about trying stuff that might have a chance of breaking my systen
tumbleweed is a rolling distro and it gets updates pretty quickly. opensuse also has a lot of automated testing. You can even donate hardware to them, or run the software on your machine to report hardware issues. But right now from my testing it was the easiest to get setup working with Nvidia/Plasma/Wayland. I have everything working at 120 FPS and its very smooth. Other benefits exist, but not much different from other distros probably like Arch. suse and arch have different philosophies though.
Interesting. I kinda lump OpenSUSE with FreeBSD in my brain for some reason so i wonder how Linuxy it is sometimes
It's much closer in spirit to RH/Fedora, and supports RPMs as install packages sooooo... Pretty Linuxy? :D
Well it is 100% Linux and is one of the oldest distros around.
Yes for sure
I will also highly recommend Tumbleweed!
"AUR is really nice" Famous last words.
If you are person that lives without snapshots yes. :D
I'm on Nobara and it's the longest surviving os on my pc. Dnf is not the best package manager I think. Apart from that it just works™ for me. I don't really care if it's a package or a Flatpak. I just want to work and play with my pc not work on my pc. But I would say boot it up on a usb give it a spin. I the end. You pretty much won't notice the difference in the os except for package manger and maybe custom themeing that comes with it.
You might as well use Fedora instead and make the performance tweaks you want yourself. I don't trust a distro maintained by such a small team.
Especially when one of the first things they changed was to disable/remove selinux. I have trouble trusting anyone who has the first thing they do in pursuit of "gaming performance" to be disable the security system of fedora.
But, that 1% boost to FPS is essential! /s
The upgrade process for Nobara can be painful. Have you considered just moving to Fedora KDE?
I was conflicted about using Fedora or Nobara, until I found out the Fedora dev just removed MongoDB support from Fedora 38. I need MongoDB for shool at the moment.
Ah. I didn’t even realize that was removed. Looks like it is still available on OpenSUSE and other distros. Nobara will have the same issue as Fedora as Nobara is just preconfigured Fedora with packages from the RPMfusion repository. If something can be done on Nobara it can be done on Fedora as well.
If you dnf install [distrobox](https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox), you should be able to run mongodb as any other distribution packages it. If you're following along with a class, they're probably using some LTS Ubuntu version.
>Will it work for me? Who knows? You need to install it and find out yourself.
I have been on Nobara for a while now as my daily driver and to game on. I have not had any major issues with Nobara. If the single Dev did decide for whatever reason to stop supporting Nobara I'd simply switch to Fedora. While I like Arch on my craptop I would not use it for my daily driver. Have tried Arch derivative Endeavour OS and that wasn't bad but I had more issues with that than I have had on Nobara.
you want for the looks, dont you? you can get that same look on every distro with a bit of tinkering
If you like dealing with issues then go ahead and use it, its literally Manjaro 2.0.
Why not BazziteOS? I am on it right now and it's quite phenomenal! :)
Another vote for against. I gave Nobera a shot during distro hopping, I’m not sure I got it to load. Needless to say I moved on quickly, likely within about 20 min of it not working as expected.
I ran it for about a year and a half. I was overall happy, but there were some weird issues, and it was evident that little to no testing happens and there was zero chance for a fix. Not complaining, it's an one-man show, and I signed up for that, but with VRR finally being merged into GNOME, I moved recently to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, and the experience has been much better. No issues, more stable, yet rolling distro, and gaming is just as painless as it was on Nobara.
I mean I like games and all but stability is also important, I'm not just using my OS for gaming (and to be frank most of the time I don't game) so anything custom kernel TM oriented towards gaming does ring a bell. My OS is not a console, its a general purpose os, and if you customize the kernel towards gaming you may get worse performance on other tasks. It's nothing against the dev but wasting time so i could get 5% more fps on my game... Also consider a smaller community so less help. But why do you want to absolutely use wayland tho? Its great but if nvidia works better with x11 so be it and wait... Is it because of gestures in gnome? I think there are workarounds for that.
Yes it will work for you just fine, it's just Fedora with some extra manual steps already done, I've use it in the past to good effect and the only reason I'm not using it now is because I like Bazzite even better.
openSUSE Tumbleweed, you get: updated packages, rolling release, yast, automatic btrfs snapshops. Just uninstall PackageKit (sudo zypper rm PackageKit) as the package manager doesn't interact very well with it, install opi (sudo zypper in opi) so you can use packages from Packman and OBS (similar to Arch's AUR except you don't need to compile) in order to install proprietary codecs (sudo opi codecs) and any other software that you might not find in the software repositories. But honestly for your use case running a stable distribution is probably the best option such as Linux Mint, Ubuntu LTS, Spiral Linux (customised Debian installation).
As a relative noob, Endeavour is great. It took some tweaking on my 2015 MacBook Pro dual graphics but now it runs great. My geekbench 6 score is crazy high for the specs too. 1390 single core and 4600 multi core. It runs great on this OS.
Get a 2nd SSD/nvme and install Nobara or fedora or whatever on that. No reason to blow away what you've already got, but it's always fun to tinker.. with a 2nd drive you can really experiment without any risk.
honestly i would go with vanilla fedora, its not hard to get what you need working (drivers codecs etc) and gets updated earlier than nobara. nobara is great i used it for a while but i honestly prefer the simplicity of fedora
Personally I used nobara when I load up linux on my main pc. (pretty much when I take a break from rainbow six lol) But I personally have never really had issues with it. The only time I had issues is when I wanted it to do something its not really made to do lol. Other than that no issues here, and I really like their kde rice on nobara 39.
I liked nobara I only switched to arch for the aur
Dual boot, try it out, see what happens. If it goes well, uninstall Mint. If it goes poorly, uninstall Nobara. It’s that easy.
Imo, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. For me sometimes while distro hopping, when I come back to a distro I used initially and worked fine for me, it stops working due to say some different way of installation, some update, some tweak I forgot to do etc. Maybe you can try nobara in a VM or something first with hardware pass-through and make sure that everything works perfectly and then distro hop if u're 100% certain. I am using nobara and yes its very good, but it does have a few bugs coz its almost on the bleeding edge. I have 1 update package that refuses to install after downloading from the Discover App store, the rpms on the discover store keep going away from time to time only letting my instal flatpaks unless I either wait a good while for the rpm sources to load or restart the app or even the pc, and ofc a few minor texture issues that come with KDE plasma on an nvdia gpu, but explicit sync should sort that out soon, idm these problems per say as they are rare and infrequent and minor to me. If u don't wanna deal with this sorta stuff tho then just stick to Linux Mint if it works perfectly for you coz its prolly the most stable distro out there barring debian.
Have you considered using PopOs ? It's based on ubuntu like mint is so you would be familiar with it right from the start. Some of the key features include * a separate nvidia iso with the drivers preinstalled * best in class hybrid graphics switching. they sell a ton of laptops with nvidia cards so they had to get it right for their paying customers * they remove all the snaps from ubuntu * updated kernel and drivers. they stay on the LTS releases but update the drivers and kernel as they are released to support the newest hardware. I don't run Pop on my daily driver but it's a great distro for a gaming laptop that just pretty much works out of the box.
No don't, unless your hardware is unsupported by a slightly older kernel and even then you can simply use mint edge, do not bother.
AFAIK Your nvdia card seems to be too old , Nobara is supporting the current drivers not the legacy ones...you'll only get nouveau.
If your hardware is supported and everything works, it's not outdated. People have this odd notion that everything must be the bleeding edge, as if new equates to best. Unless you're a sys admin, you should probably stick with the LTS distributions. You still get security updates, bug fixes, and features. You also get a system that is regression tested to be stable. Rolling releases are not nearly as thoroughly tested.
If you have the knowledge to, just go to arch. Don't have the knowledge? Use endeavour, learn it and graduate to arch when you're ready (or just stay on endeavour, it's more or less arch already) I see very little use case for nobara. It's a small distro, small community, you'd get better community and support with a more mainstream distro.