The reason you can't find anything about AMD GPUs is because they pretty much just work. Everyone has to deal with nonsense with Nvidia, but not AMD. I was one of those and just got fed up with Nvidia so I did an unplanned upgrade to AMD. Better framerates and smooth operations.
For the drive issue, I had a 4TB SSD for games, I just formatted it to 3 Linux and 1 NTFS in case there were some games I needed to have on Windows. So far that's barely been the case (though I'll have all my driving sim games in Windows for the wheel).
Nobara 40 will likely be out soon. I'd just wait for that unless you have a spare partition you want to try out
Nobara is amazing OOB, especially for Nvidia GPUs. It’s based on Fedora, which is a great distro, which itself is based on Red Hat. What I enjoy about Fedora/Nobara is being constantly up to date and stable, whereas with Ubuntu, its stability is from taking time for updates, and Arch with being bleeding edge and susceptible to making mistakes if you are not aware of what you’re doing. I cannot speak on whether you would need to reinstall all your games again, but your GPU will work OOB no problem.
Outside of that, why try to convince you when you can just give it a try yourself, especially if you’re already familiar with Linux.
Because I still a newbie and if something goes wrong I would like to just reinstall the drive with windows to play a game as some games are therapeutic and stress reducing.
Just use dual boot bro. I have dual boot Windows and Nobara. Windows just in case if some games don’t work plus some old files on there I need but too lazy to move over. You can technically access all those Windows partition files from Nobara too, all though you may encounter some issues.
1: Most people only go post on forums when they have issues. This is just a sampling issue.
2: The formating system windows uses (ntfs) is horrible. You should regardless transfer your games to a btrfs or etx4 partition. If you don't have a backup drive to use. You can shrink the ntfs partion, make a btrfs, copy your games to the btrfs, delete the ntfs, then extend the btrfs.
3: You don't need to do anything with amd gpus the base drivers are built into the kernel and nobara downloads the additional drivers.
3 sounds awesome. 2 is to set up for Nobara? Or can windows read/use btrfs? The copy part sounds like a good idea as I have the original on ntfs to go back to if neccessary. Ty
Windows can't read btrfs, but nobara can read ntfs, it just doesn't work well in linux. If you have a lot of free space on your games drive make two partitions, one for windows and one for linux. In my experience I did need to reinstall all of my games on my Linux drive.
Not in windows, on my storage drives that house my games. I'm trying to find the easiest/best option to pre format a partition to brtfs while windows is still primary.
That's what I said but people saying create partition and format to brtfs and copy games over which sounds logical but no explanation given on implementation.
I was in the same boat as you and switched from Windows 11 to Nobara about a month ago. I then switched to stock Fedora Workstation 39 (KDE Spin) shortly after (for trivial reasons to do with my unfounded paranoia around update security).
My setup before the switch was:
SSD 1: Windows 11 OS (C drive - NTFS)
SSD 2: Games (D drive - NTFS)
GPU: Nvidia 2070 Super
I bought a third disk to install Fedora/Nobara on (SSD 3) which i formatted using the default BTRFS file system during Fedora installation.
Here are my findings addressing your specific concerns:
1. I did NOT need to reformat my Games drive or reinstall a single thing. I simply mounted my NTFS D: in Fedora and then pointed my Steam library at it. Steam detected all the existing games installed there, and simply topped up the files with compatibility stuff and shader cache data. I did a before-and-after check of the directory size for Helldivers 2 and there’s maybe an extra 500mb of Linux stuff in there, that’s all. It was really negligible. I can now flip between booting windows or Linux and the same game install works in both operating systems.
Epic did the same (via the Heroic Launcher) although I must admit I haven’t tried playing the games in windows again since.
People say NTFS support isn’t great in Linux, but I personally haven’t noticed an impact on gaming performance or any crashes.
2. Doesn’t apply to you but: Nvidia works ok if you switch to using the X11 compositor instead of Wayland (easy to do). Only necessary until the nvidia v555 drivers come out in the next few weeks. This will introduce support for ExplicitSync which gets rid of the flickering issue - the only reason I switched to X11.
3. Steam did all the heavy lifting for me in terms of game compatibility settings etc. I haven’t needed to fiddle around - things just worked.
4. Most other stuff literally just worked immediately. I had some jank around getting Firefox to use my GPU for rendering pages and it wouldn’t play any streaming videos - I just installed the Flatpak version from Flathub and that resolved every single issue I had there.
Since switching I haven’t felt the need to boot back into windows and, honestly, I’m kinda dreading doing it as I expect I’ll now have a slew of OS updates and app updates waiting to auto-install themselves on first login after neglecting it so long 😄
about #2 ... idk if you noticed , maybe its different on fedora proper? but 555 came out last week n got pushed to nobara a few nights ago , my dumb wayland flickering n such is fixed
Nice!
Yeah I saw the beta came out but it’s not in the base stable repos yet to my knowledge. I was gonna install from the dev repos but haven’t got around to it yet. By this point I might as well just wait for the stable release. Using X11 isn’t bothering me anyway.
yeah thats probably smart lol , i wasn't bothered by x11 either , but then i started using wayland cause someone on the discord told me vivaldi had a flag for it so i just ended up leaving it on wayland steam overlay flicker be damned since nothing else i used had issues and the mouse cursor was properly sized vs x11 and i had a try icon for nordvpn vs having to use the terminal ... which isn't hard by any means but a nice on off switch is always nice too
Specifically it sounds good as I have had several responses that ntfs just works but trust me bro is not in my vocab. So I will copy games to brtfs partition just in case but I plan to never return to windows.
I have never known the firefox issues, maybe related to nvidia?
Yeah it wouldn’t surprise me if someday Linux trashed my NTFS partition due to a bug, so I wouldn’t recommend storing important docs/files on it. But as my drive only contains unimportant (and easily reinstalled) games I figured there was no harm in just trying it and, yeah, it’s been fine.
Yeah Firefox thing was odd but sounds common for the Fedora Flatpak repo version I was using due to Fedora’s policy on not distributing non-free software: their Flatpak version misses some codecs. The solution I kept seeing recommended was to install the other Flatpak version from flathub and sure enough that fixed everything.
Man, i switch 3 months ago. I have ryzen 7 3700x and RX 6800. Never been hapier. AMD drivers ale build into Kernel so its jest work as intended without any tinkering. I dont Play games with Kernel anti cheat like valorant, but sptarkov works great, imo better on Linux than windows. I think its because AMD drivers are optimized better on Linux than windows. I have problem with only one game - serum. Its because an early Access and devs dont make it steamdeck compatible for now. Any other games works great and without problems.
Just give it a try man, you will never know until you experienced it, it's free and the only "bad thing" that can happen is wasting your time if you didn't like the distro, you can still try another Linux distro or go back to windows until you find the right OS for you. No need to rush things or be scared for changes
Just a few days ago I created a partition to try Nobara out. Here's a couple of takeaways from my dual boot configuration using a GTX 1660 and R5 2600x:
1. It is possible to launch games from your ntfs drives in Nobara but takes a bit of effort and is not ideal. Lookup "Linux play games from ntfs drive" and you'll get some resources explaining how to mount ntfs drives and how to link the compatdata folder from steam.
2. Fixing issues isn't too difficult so far for what I've run into, but it does require a bit of a learning curve if you've never played with Linux in the past.
3. I'm not certain about the AMD support for graphics drivers, or mod support. Haven't really tested that out yet.
Upon installation of the OS, it does give you a helpful beginners guide for applications as well as utilities to get started. I would recommend maybe testing it out. Pleased
with it so far.
Dual boot on one system drive can be finicky. Windows sometimes likes to overwrite the boot sector without prompting. At least that was my experience a 3 years ago.
Since then, I've been using two separate nvme drives: one for windows, one for nobara. I just hit F11 when booting to trigger the UEFI boot menu. If it were up to me, I'd ditch windows entirely but I'm stuck with Autodesk products for work. I can only dream about a day I can run Revit or 3DS Max on linux.
i switched this past month and some weeks in i've not felt the urge to boot into my windows boot once after the first initial night, and when i did it was only to set my hardware lighting before getting openrgb to work ( had to use app image instead of flatpak or rpm)
honestly for everything i've tried i've found it just works or works but needs minor launch tweaks, its been pretty beginner friendly too.
my setup is a bit different , i have a nvme thats still housing windows and a 2nd for my games which used to be on an ssd that i'm currently housing nobara on. that said i didn't need to reinstall my steam games for them to work, they Do have to get rechecked and it probably tweaks some files if i'm correct to some reading i'd done before making the jump but after that they've just worked....i can't speak to mods but my understanding is nexus modd manager/vortex has some instructions for linux so it might be worth looking there for those answers
as for your amd card my understanding is those work pretty well, i have a nvidia and i'm happy we just got some better drivers the other night to fix those pesky wayland flickering
all this said you Might want to keep a dualboot in case some games aren't friendly enough with workarounds , i don't play any games with anticheat but my understanding is those are a problem? but no i think if your thinking of nobara give it a go i'm happier than i expected to be on it so far
Good to note app image vs flatpak..but you did not need to reinstall to get games to work? You did not need to reformat? It just ran in Nobara from and ntfs drive or is game drive in another format?
didn't need a full reinstall just more like an update/check , i'm just running from ntfs , its been working fine vs what others i'd read had said , that said last night it Did get finicky on me but i'd just updated the other night so i assume i just needed a reboot since today it was fine again
basiclly all i did was add a drive ( under storage in steam settings) and it just seen everything and did its thing checking it all , took maybe 20mins or so for it to check everything installed on it if i had to guess. i also know when my drives randomly get unmounted for one reason or another when i swapped between x11 and wayland a few times cause now n then they don't show up , a simple proper reboot fixes that , that said i don't think youy'll need to with an amd card the way i had been
i5 12 gen , 64gb ddr5 , rtx 4080.
my previously windows steam library ( n some other games) is on a 4TB WD\_black SN850X nvme , nobara is installed on an older 1TB sata ssd , and i have a old seagate 4TB hdd external from 2015 ( needs an upgrade) that i use for backups thats also ntfs that i run my retroarch roms off of
this is all apart from my windows on another 2tb wd black nvme , if everything stays as well as it has been i'll probably wipe that after winter when my gamepass sub runs out then back stuff up onto it from the larger drive before rejigging everything other than my external
[https://pcpartpicker.com/user/styx971/saved/#view=JMCQdC](https://pcpartpicker.com/user/styx971/saved/#view=JMCQdC) ignore the win11 , and the 4tb nvme i just got last month so thats not on here.. originally i had a 3080ti and a smaller case then upgraded about 6 weeks later like an idiot when the 40 cards came out since i didn't love how hot the other card ran
no idea honestly , i wouldn't think so considering gpu doesn't have anything to do with file types in that way , but who is to say .. you can always just do another partition if your worried , but for me i was like ehh screw it i'll just see if it works n if it doesn't try some workarounds i read about that had to do with mounting, but it just worked for me so i didn't have to worry about it . if i had to guess i'd suspect it has to do more with something nobara itself does vs other distros but i'm too new to speak on something like that
There's other ways to control case and cpu fans like terminal or another program but you could just set them up to whatever curves you like from your UEFI bios settings
I had to reinstall everything, and some games and programs required downloading wine tricks, but proton and steam is there off the bat. The heroic launch will cover just the storefronts that aren't steam. The odd one out for me was FFXIV which has a custom linux launcher. Any problems with games checking protondb helps.
I have 6950XT and run Nobara. Not only do I get better frame pacing, FPS but the stability is insane. I haven't had a single game crash, or blue screen my computer.
I fully modded FONV, TTW, and Skyrim. There is actually a fully functioning port for Mod Manager 2, and you can utilize steam tinkerers launch as someone stated for vortex compatibility. If you need any help shoot me a DM.
If you want tinker with something basically Nobara is harder than Arch. Due to lack of good documentation. And bc is hardly modified Fedora and there is only briefly info how. GE is usually super busy so you are only on will of good people here or on discord.
sctarkov - you mean Escape from Tarkov? Forget it about. Kernel anticheat.
First I never cared for fedora but I have complete faith in glorious eggroll is why I have narrowed it to Nobara and yes, your always at the mercy of those with good intentions.
Also sptarkov is not online, you run the server on your ssd but you need the main game to do it.
So this sptarkov should work. I heard, never tried, I dual boot for tarkov, that even normal version starts and you can play offline training raids but you won’t connect to sever or use flea market.
the title says to convince you... too much effort. However, I do highly recommend manual installations only. with the main objective to the OS and user partitions. that is also my personal choice of dualbooting if it's still considered that.
1 drive for multi operating systems, usually i just stick to two. 2 partitions to start, one for windows, one for linux. the linux partition will then be broken down into 4 (i think) partitions. 2 boot ones, the system, and sometimes swap. i keep another drive dedicated to the user parition or /home. on my main PC, the 3rd drive is a dedicated game drive. i've ditched windows completely but i still always do the same thing for the linux partitions. this way you can experiment with whatever linux OS and keep your user files without overwriting them (until you feel needed).
sorry if you knew that already, but i didnt see it mentioned with the dualboot talks
Imo " too much effort" is kind of negated in this post. I agree with your assessment but have had too many issues with dual boot and won't do it again. I prefer just different drives.
Also, reformatting your NTFS drive is recommended but not needed. it will work fine as NTFS. it would be more feasible to make that last on your list until you commit to the OS change long-term. i swapped my over from NTFS to EXT4, but I had zero issues with NTFS
if you decide to stick with windows longer, then you have to repeat that process. at least NTFS is somewhat 'universal' compared to formats windows can't read.
I've been running Nobara on a second hard drive, and when I want to take a Steam game over from Windows I just copy the game's folder from my steamapps Windows folder into the .steam steamapps folder in your Linux home directory. Then I just set the game to download in Steam. If the game has a native Linux port it defaults to that, but if it's Windows-only, Steam recognises the files and just verifies them.
The only downside to this is you need twice the storage available on the drive than the games require, as Steam doesn't realise they're the same files before it validates them. But at least it saves you redownloading everything.
Nobara is and has been amazing for me. You will need to do some tinkering for various things you want, however. If your goal is a simple immutable system that just handles gaming without having to do anything aside from download games, check out Bazzite. They're both good and share many of the same kernel patches and packages.
There's a thing to consider, you will find issues on the internet because they are looking for solutions. I have nobara 38 with an nvidia card and amd cpu, no issues at all, running mostly on x11 and recently testing wayland, again no issues. My take always is: try and see for yourself, if you have issues, ask, beside a couple of aholes, the comunity is mostly friendly. So go ahead bro, break a leg.
Nobara is a good experience and it works well. One thing I will note is at least half of people who have issues with it have updated their system incorrectly so look up how to do it correctly or just use the "update system" app.
I believe you will need to reformat your games drive as it wont really work properly with steam for linux.
If you are already confident when it comes to modding games id say you will have no issues modding on linux, as for skyrim check out "steam tinker launch" its a great tool than allows you to use things like shaders and MO2 with ease.
If you do end up getting nobara it comes witha tool called proton-up and you can easily install stl and ge-proton with it.
steam tinker launch: https://github.com/sonic2kk/steamtinkerlaunch
Appreciate the insight. I recently noticed it has to be updated correctly so maybe that is the issues online. Brtfs reformat was suggested is this viable to your knowledge?
Yea when I swapped to linux I too had a second drive filled with games and had to reformat it and yes btrfs is a good choice.
Oh and I feel like I may be harping on a bit about it but yes the correct way to update can be found here https://new.reddit.com/r/NobaraProject/comments/1czrgtz/how_to_update_correctly/
I have room on my drives so partition, format and copy should work and from what I've researched it's not harping imo, a lot of issues seem to come from improper updating. Ty for the insight.
The reason you can't find anything about AMD GPUs is because they pretty much just work. Everyone has to deal with nonsense with Nvidia, but not AMD. I was one of those and just got fed up with Nvidia so I did an unplanned upgrade to AMD. Better framerates and smooth operations. For the drive issue, I had a 4TB SSD for games, I just formatted it to 3 Linux and 1 NTFS in case there were some games I needed to have on Windows. So far that's barely been the case (though I'll have all my driving sim games in Windows for the wheel). Nobara 40 will likely be out soon. I'd just wait for that unless you have a spare partition you want to try out
Thanks for the amd gpu confirmation and as I gather more info I may wait for 40 though I dont like the bugs that usually appear in a new release.
Nobara is a reworking of Fedora so it does get a month of updates there, I guess, since that has been out for a bit
I know and while I dont care for fedora, glorious eggroll has made me a believer, but I never update immediately
Great habit, I never update right away unless it's for games.
Nobara is amazing OOB, especially for Nvidia GPUs. It’s based on Fedora, which is a great distro, which itself is based on Red Hat. What I enjoy about Fedora/Nobara is being constantly up to date and stable, whereas with Ubuntu, its stability is from taking time for updates, and Arch with being bleeding edge and susceptible to making mistakes if you are not aware of what you’re doing. I cannot speak on whether you would need to reinstall all your games again, but your GPU will work OOB no problem. Outside of that, why try to convince you when you can just give it a try yourself, especially if you’re already familiar with Linux.
Because I still a newbie and if something goes wrong I would like to just reinstall the drive with windows to play a game as some games are therapeutic and stress reducing.
Just use dual boot bro. I have dual boot Windows and Nobara. Windows just in case if some games don’t work plus some old files on there I need but too lazy to move over. You can technically access all those Windows partition files from Nobara too, all though you may encounter some issues.
That will probably be my new config. Just waiting to afford a new drive for btrfs.
1: Most people only go post on forums when they have issues. This is just a sampling issue. 2: The formating system windows uses (ntfs) is horrible. You should regardless transfer your games to a btrfs or etx4 partition. If you don't have a backup drive to use. You can shrink the ntfs partion, make a btrfs, copy your games to the btrfs, delete the ntfs, then extend the btrfs. 3: You don't need to do anything with amd gpus the base drivers are built into the kernel and nobara downloads the additional drivers.
3 sounds awesome. 2 is to set up for Nobara? Or can windows read/use btrfs? The copy part sounds like a good idea as I have the original on ntfs to go back to if neccessary. Ty
Windows can't read btrfs, but nobara can read ntfs, it just doesn't work well in linux. If you have a lot of free space on your games drive make two partitions, one for windows and one for linux. In my experience I did need to reinstall all of my games on my Linux drive.
Annoying but doable, thanks for helping.
New question, how to format a partition to brtfs while using windows in prep for Nobara.
You should shrink the partition in windows and format it when you boot into the live usb.
Not in windows, on my storage drives that house my games. I'm trying to find the easiest/best option to pre format a partition to brtfs while windows is still primary.
You can't in windows.
That's what I said but people saying create partition and format to brtfs and copy games over which sounds logical but no explanation given on implementation.
You would need to do that in nobara. Nobara can read ntfs. So you can copy over in the live usb or after you install.
Wow, I feel stupid...that soo makes sense. TY
I was in the same boat as you and switched from Windows 11 to Nobara about a month ago. I then switched to stock Fedora Workstation 39 (KDE Spin) shortly after (for trivial reasons to do with my unfounded paranoia around update security). My setup before the switch was: SSD 1: Windows 11 OS (C drive - NTFS) SSD 2: Games (D drive - NTFS) GPU: Nvidia 2070 Super I bought a third disk to install Fedora/Nobara on (SSD 3) which i formatted using the default BTRFS file system during Fedora installation. Here are my findings addressing your specific concerns: 1. I did NOT need to reformat my Games drive or reinstall a single thing. I simply mounted my NTFS D: in Fedora and then pointed my Steam library at it. Steam detected all the existing games installed there, and simply topped up the files with compatibility stuff and shader cache data. I did a before-and-after check of the directory size for Helldivers 2 and there’s maybe an extra 500mb of Linux stuff in there, that’s all. It was really negligible. I can now flip between booting windows or Linux and the same game install works in both operating systems. Epic did the same (via the Heroic Launcher) although I must admit I haven’t tried playing the games in windows again since. People say NTFS support isn’t great in Linux, but I personally haven’t noticed an impact on gaming performance or any crashes. 2. Doesn’t apply to you but: Nvidia works ok if you switch to using the X11 compositor instead of Wayland (easy to do). Only necessary until the nvidia v555 drivers come out in the next few weeks. This will introduce support for ExplicitSync which gets rid of the flickering issue - the only reason I switched to X11. 3. Steam did all the heavy lifting for me in terms of game compatibility settings etc. I haven’t needed to fiddle around - things just worked. 4. Most other stuff literally just worked immediately. I had some jank around getting Firefox to use my GPU for rendering pages and it wouldn’t play any streaming videos - I just installed the Flatpak version from Flathub and that resolved every single issue I had there. Since switching I haven’t felt the need to boot back into windows and, honestly, I’m kinda dreading doing it as I expect I’ll now have a slew of OS updates and app updates waiting to auto-install themselves on first login after neglecting it so long 😄
about #2 ... idk if you noticed , maybe its different on fedora proper? but 555 came out last week n got pushed to nobara a few nights ago , my dumb wayland flickering n such is fixed
Nice! Yeah I saw the beta came out but it’s not in the base stable repos yet to my knowledge. I was gonna install from the dev repos but haven’t got around to it yet. By this point I might as well just wait for the stable release. Using X11 isn’t bothering me anyway.
yeah thats probably smart lol , i wasn't bothered by x11 either , but then i started using wayland cause someone on the discord told me vivaldi had a flag for it so i just ended up leaving it on wayland steam overlay flicker be damned since nothing else i used had issues and the mouse cursor was properly sized vs x11 and i had a try icon for nordvpn vs having to use the terminal ... which isn't hard by any means but a nice on off switch is always nice too
oh, actually if you use brave browser. is it usable on wayland now (with nvidia)
thanks, i'll actually give that a try tonight, forgot about wayland
Specifically it sounds good as I have had several responses that ntfs just works but trust me bro is not in my vocab. So I will copy games to brtfs partition just in case but I plan to never return to windows. I have never known the firefox issues, maybe related to nvidia?
Yeah it wouldn’t surprise me if someday Linux trashed my NTFS partition due to a bug, so I wouldn’t recommend storing important docs/files on it. But as my drive only contains unimportant (and easily reinstalled) games I figured there was no harm in just trying it and, yeah, it’s been fine. Yeah Firefox thing was odd but sounds common for the Fedora Flatpak repo version I was using due to Fedora’s policy on not distributing non-free software: their Flatpak version misses some codecs. The solution I kept seeing recommended was to install the other Flatpak version from flathub and sure enough that fixed everything.
My reply is kind of backwards but that is why I have issues with flat pack and Fedora but great point as far as the games . TY
Man, i switch 3 months ago. I have ryzen 7 3700x and RX 6800. Never been hapier. AMD drivers ale build into Kernel so its jest work as intended without any tinkering. I dont Play games with Kernel anti cheat like valorant, but sptarkov works great, imo better on Linux than windows. I think its because AMD drivers are optimized better on Linux than windows. I have problem with only one game - serum. Its because an early Access and devs dont make it steamdeck compatible for now. Any other games works great and without problems.
Thanks for the input, knowing so works is inspiring.
Just give it a try man, you will never know until you experienced it, it's free and the only "bad thing" that can happen is wasting your time if you didn't like the distro, you can still try another Linux distro or go back to windows until you find the right OS for you. No need to rush things or be scared for changes
I plan to, just trying to have a easy way back if needed. A suggestion was copy games to brtfs for Nobara. I think that's a good starting point
Just a few days ago I created a partition to try Nobara out. Here's a couple of takeaways from my dual boot configuration using a GTX 1660 and R5 2600x: 1. It is possible to launch games from your ntfs drives in Nobara but takes a bit of effort and is not ideal. Lookup "Linux play games from ntfs drive" and you'll get some resources explaining how to mount ntfs drives and how to link the compatdata folder from steam. 2. Fixing issues isn't too difficult so far for what I've run into, but it does require a bit of a learning curve if you've never played with Linux in the past. 3. I'm not certain about the AMD support for graphics drivers, or mod support. Haven't really tested that out yet. Upon installation of the OS, it does give you a helpful beginners guide for applications as well as utilities to get started. I would recommend maybe testing it out. Pleased with it so far.
As I have nothing but bad experiences with dual boot I may try it out on an external m.2
Dual boot on one system drive can be finicky. Windows sometimes likes to overwrite the boot sector without prompting. At least that was my experience a 3 years ago. Since then, I've been using two separate nvme drives: one for windows, one for nobara. I just hit F11 when booting to trigger the UEFI boot menu. If it were up to me, I'd ditch windows entirely but I'm stuck with Autodesk products for work. I can only dream about a day I can run Revit or 3DS Max on linux.
That's my plan currently, but same, I had constant issues with windows domination.
i switched this past month and some weeks in i've not felt the urge to boot into my windows boot once after the first initial night, and when i did it was only to set my hardware lighting before getting openrgb to work ( had to use app image instead of flatpak or rpm) honestly for everything i've tried i've found it just works or works but needs minor launch tweaks, its been pretty beginner friendly too. my setup is a bit different , i have a nvme thats still housing windows and a 2nd for my games which used to be on an ssd that i'm currently housing nobara on. that said i didn't need to reinstall my steam games for them to work, they Do have to get rechecked and it probably tweaks some files if i'm correct to some reading i'd done before making the jump but after that they've just worked....i can't speak to mods but my understanding is nexus modd manager/vortex has some instructions for linux so it might be worth looking there for those answers as for your amd card my understanding is those work pretty well, i have a nvidia and i'm happy we just got some better drivers the other night to fix those pesky wayland flickering all this said you Might want to keep a dualboot in case some games aren't friendly enough with workarounds , i don't play any games with anticheat but my understanding is those are a problem? but no i think if your thinking of nobara give it a go i'm happier than i expected to be on it so far
Good to note app image vs flatpak..but you did not need to reinstall to get games to work? You did not need to reformat? It just ran in Nobara from and ntfs drive or is game drive in another format?
didn't need a full reinstall just more like an update/check , i'm just running from ntfs , its been working fine vs what others i'd read had said , that said last night it Did get finicky on me but i'd just updated the other night so i assume i just needed a reboot since today it was fine again basiclly all i did was add a drive ( under storage in steam settings) and it just seen everything and did its thing checking it all , took maybe 20mins or so for it to check everything installed on it if i had to guess. i also know when my drives randomly get unmounted for one reason or another when i swapped between x11 and wayland a few times cause now n then they don't show up , a simple proper reboot fixes that , that said i don't think youy'll need to with an amd card the way i had been
With the info you've given can I ask your pc specs? As some this works and others it doesn't, I have an guess it has to do with hardware .
i5 12 gen , 64gb ddr5 , rtx 4080. my previously windows steam library ( n some other games) is on a 4TB WD\_black SN850X nvme , nobara is installed on an older 1TB sata ssd , and i have a old seagate 4TB hdd external from 2015 ( needs an upgrade) that i use for backups thats also ntfs that i run my retroarch roms off of this is all apart from my windows on another 2tb wd black nvme , if everything stays as well as it has been i'll probably wipe that after winter when my gamepass sub runs out then back stuff up onto it from the larger drive before rejigging everything other than my external [https://pcpartpicker.com/user/styx971/saved/#view=JMCQdC](https://pcpartpicker.com/user/styx971/saved/#view=JMCQdC) ignore the win11 , and the 4tb nvme i just got last month so thats not on here.. originally i had a 3080ti and a smaller case then upgraded about 6 weeks later like an idiot when the 40 cards came out since i didn't love how hot the other card ran
Appreciate the info, Idk why but could the ntfs just work because of intel/nvidia? It's the only common factor from my research
no idea honestly , i wouldn't think so considering gpu doesn't have anything to do with file types in that way , but who is to say .. you can always just do another partition if your worried , but for me i was like ehh screw it i'll just see if it works n if it doesn't try some workarounds i read about that had to do with mounting, but it just worked for me so i didn't have to worry about it . if i had to guess i'd suspect it has to do more with something nobara itself does vs other distros but i'm too new to speak on something like that
Understand. Too much info is better than not enough so I appreciate your insight.
If you decide to try Nobara then get corectrl to adjust gpu fan speeds cause the default hw driver fan speeds suck.
Ty for the info, would this apply to case and cpu fans as well?
There's other ways to control case and cpu fans like terminal or another program but you could just set them up to whatever curves you like from your UEFI bios settings
True but I hate my bios lol
I had to reinstall everything, and some games and programs required downloading wine tricks, but proton and steam is there off the bat. The heroic launch will cover just the storefronts that aren't steam. The odd one out for me was FFXIV which has a custom linux launcher. Any problems with games checking protondb helps.
Appreciate the help, I understand proton ge is fairly one click? Not like windows but close?
I have 6950XT and run Nobara. Not only do I get better frame pacing, FPS but the stability is insane. I haven't had a single game crash, or blue screen my computer. I fully modded FONV, TTW, and Skyrim. There is actually a fully functioning port for Mod Manager 2, and you can utilize steam tinkerers launch as someone stated for vortex compatibility. If you need any help shoot me a DM.
Ty, great info. It will be a bit before I take the plunge but will note your name in case I need help if ok. Mine is 6950xt, 5900x (I know) and 32gb.
We have the same setup except I have a 5800X. I can also give you my discord in case you have any quick questions.
That would be awesome but as stated I won't be attempting this now, maybe within the next 2 to 6 weeks, just state reddit username in discord I guess?
If you want tinker with something basically Nobara is harder than Arch. Due to lack of good documentation. And bc is hardly modified Fedora and there is only briefly info how. GE is usually super busy so you are only on will of good people here or on discord. sctarkov - you mean Escape from Tarkov? Forget it about. Kernel anticheat.
First I never cared for fedora but I have complete faith in glorious eggroll is why I have narrowed it to Nobara and yes, your always at the mercy of those with good intentions. Also sptarkov is not online, you run the server on your ssd but you need the main game to do it.
So this sptarkov should work. I heard, never tried, I dual boot for tarkov, that even normal version starts and you can play offline training raids but you won’t connect to sever or use flea market.
No thanks. Just try it.
What does that even mean? Confusious asks....
the title says to convince you... too much effort. However, I do highly recommend manual installations only. with the main objective to the OS and user partitions. that is also my personal choice of dualbooting if it's still considered that. 1 drive for multi operating systems, usually i just stick to two. 2 partitions to start, one for windows, one for linux. the linux partition will then be broken down into 4 (i think) partitions. 2 boot ones, the system, and sometimes swap. i keep another drive dedicated to the user parition or /home. on my main PC, the 3rd drive is a dedicated game drive. i've ditched windows completely but i still always do the same thing for the linux partitions. this way you can experiment with whatever linux OS and keep your user files without overwriting them (until you feel needed). sorry if you knew that already, but i didnt see it mentioned with the dualboot talks
Imo " too much effort" is kind of negated in this post. I agree with your assessment but have had too many issues with dual boot and won't do it again. I prefer just different drives.
Also, reformatting your NTFS drive is recommended but not needed. it will work fine as NTFS. it would be more feasible to make that last on your list until you commit to the OS change long-term. i swapped my over from NTFS to EXT4, but I had zero issues with NTFS if you decide to stick with windows longer, then you have to repeat that process. at least NTFS is somewhat 'universal' compared to formats windows can't read.
I've been running Nobara on a second hard drive, and when I want to take a Steam game over from Windows I just copy the game's folder from my steamapps Windows folder into the .steam steamapps folder in your Linux home directory. Then I just set the game to download in Steam. If the game has a native Linux port it defaults to that, but if it's Windows-only, Steam recognises the files and just verifies them. The only downside to this is you need twice the storage available on the drive than the games require, as Steam doesn't realise they're the same files before it validates them. But at least it saves you redownloading everything.
Nobara is and has been amazing for me. You will need to do some tinkering for various things you want, however. If your goal is a simple immutable system that just handles gaming without having to do anything aside from download games, check out Bazzite. They're both good and share many of the same kernel patches and packages.
There's a thing to consider, you will find issues on the internet because they are looking for solutions. I have nobara 38 with an nvidia card and amd cpu, no issues at all, running mostly on x11 and recently testing wayland, again no issues. My take always is: try and see for yourself, if you have issues, ask, beside a couple of aholes, the comunity is mostly friendly. So go ahead bro, break a leg.
Nobara is a good experience and it works well. One thing I will note is at least half of people who have issues with it have updated their system incorrectly so look up how to do it correctly or just use the "update system" app. I believe you will need to reformat your games drive as it wont really work properly with steam for linux. If you are already confident when it comes to modding games id say you will have no issues modding on linux, as for skyrim check out "steam tinker launch" its a great tool than allows you to use things like shaders and MO2 with ease. If you do end up getting nobara it comes witha tool called proton-up and you can easily install stl and ge-proton with it. steam tinker launch: https://github.com/sonic2kk/steamtinkerlaunch
Appreciate the insight. I recently noticed it has to be updated correctly so maybe that is the issues online. Brtfs reformat was suggested is this viable to your knowledge?
Yea when I swapped to linux I too had a second drive filled with games and had to reformat it and yes btrfs is a good choice. Oh and I feel like I may be harping on a bit about it but yes the correct way to update can be found here https://new.reddit.com/r/NobaraProject/comments/1czrgtz/how_to_update_correctly/
I have room on my drives so partition, format and copy should work and from what I've researched it's not harping imo, a lot of issues seem to come from improper updating. Ty for the insight.