https://open.substack.com/pub/imakethingsforu/p/why-i-switched-to-nobara-linux-and?
The Pros, Cons, and Surprises of a Bold Move
I wrote an article on my switch to Nobara Linux. I think this community might enjoy the journey.
Much of the post is the author reminiscing about how the community has changed over time, the author's Steam library, whether we need to dual boot and how great KDE is. After scrubbing through it I have no idea what makes the distribution special and why I'd want to pick it over other options.
It's basically Ubuntu for Fedora. Some QoL changes, but really it takes all the mess out of Fedora that you'd have to manually change up to get the best gaming experience. F38 is hot garbage out the box for gaming.
Agree with this, I have just built a new gaming box (first time in 10 years - wow stuff has changed!). Anyway, I daily drive Fedora on my laptop and just automatically put in on the new rig - it took a LOT of tweaking to get it right for gaming (working like a dream now). In hindsight Nobara sounds like it would have saved me a lot of time
This is a fair comment, perhaps I got lost in thought and didn't really answer the question well enough. It's special because despite the small issues, all the major needs were met more than the other distros I tried.
Here is what I gathered:
Switching to Linux mainly motivated by privacy, security, flexibility, and performance.
The writer also supports Linux as a community-driven alternative to large corporations.
The author views dual booting as beneficial for resale value, software gaps, and gaming compatibility.
The Linux installation used was Nobara, though it had its own challenges.
The writer's extensive experience with Linux dates back to the late '90s.
The Linux community's condescending and elitist attitudes are viewed as a drawback.
The writer chose Nobara Linux due to its functionality and fewer roadblocks compared to other distributions.
The performance and user experience of Nobara Linux is generally superior to Windows 11, though there are issues like Bluetooth lag and system freeze. Gaming on Steam is generally favorable, though there are minor issues with certain games.
KDE is praised for its functionality and features, especially KDE Connect for multimedia transfers. Minor issues with accessing certain file types and RGB lighting preferences are noted.
I’ve had a significantly better experience with EndeavourOS than I ever had with Nobara, or literally any other distro, and the list of them I’ve run through is pretty long. Nobara was good, and I’d be curious to see how its improved, but at this point I’m so happy with Endeavour that I don’t know when I’d ever get around to putting Nobara on bare metal again.
Same. Endeavour is everything I ever wanted out of Linux, and the time between Antergos and Endeavour were dark days indeed.
I’ve been working on my CLI skills and knowledge over the past year, and moving to an arch based system was a little confusing for me. Using yay, pacman, and git cloning were a little over my head after being used to apt and flatpak. After the first week, it all started to click, and now I’m fine, and I definitely feel more competent in the terminal, and no longer use any gui front ends for package management.
Mint and Pop had issues, steam would lag like crazy for the first five minutes after launch. Then after updating to the latest version of mint, steam stopped launching period. I’m sure it’s fixed by now, but that’s what drove me to jump ship, and it’s been the snappiest, cleanest experience I’ve had yet. I also love space, and the color purple, so it’s the first distro where I used their native theming and wallpapers, and shit it looks good.
The forum has also been a pleasant experience, the community is very friendly.
Maybe I have been lucky but I have not had much issue installing linux and having it just work. the "After delving into a few resources, I managed to get the system up and running." in the article makes me wary of the distro. I expect them to just work at this point.
nobara is great! I am on arch now, but for a plug-and-play gaming system it works great. It really feels like a fedora gaming "spin" and honestly I think fedora should try to upstream changes into that kind of distro.
I agree. I enjoyed the Arch landscape and kind of thought that's where I'd end up after the Steamdeck being so awesome. But It was just turning into too much time/work.
While I like secure boot and leave it enabled when possible, to be honest it only protects against a type of attack so elaborate its pretty much useless. Whenever its minorly inconvenient I just disable it without worry.
Secure boot is also required if you want TPM2 unlock support. Pretty niche, but nice if you have a full disk encrypted system.
Garuda is arch based so you get aur. But I can't help but feel like the ui is something late 2000's teen age me would have thought was "rad"
I'm glad it's working for you!
I haven't tried Nobara, but I did use Fedora for a year or so and decided it wasn't for me. My main complaint was how long release upgrades seemed to take. This was back when fedup was a thing (I think Fedora 17? Maybe DNF fixed that), and it took almost an hour just to do a release upgrade, which was 2-3x longer than a fresh install. I used Ubuntu before that and left for the same reason, but also because Ubuntu seemed to break something each major release.
So I switched to Arch, which worked much better imo and I used it for about 5 years. I got tired of periodic breakage (i.e. manual intervention every few months) but still wanted to keep the rolling release cycle, so I switched to openSUSE Tumbleweed. Breakage mostly went away, except for the odd NVIDIA driver screwup, but ever since moving to an AMD GPU things have been smooth. I've been on openSUSE Tumbleweed for a few years now and it's still working well. You could very well have the opposite experience as me.
So I guess what I'm saying is, find something that works for you. Maybe that's Nobara, maybe it's Ubuntu, or maybe it's something like Nix or Gentoo. Regardless, keep trying stuff until you find the right fit.
Honestly I just can't do non arch based distros these days. The AUR just makes life so dang easy, I feel spoilt by it.