The goal of Nobara isn't to give more FPS in games, the goal is to be ready for gaming out of the box and run as many games as possible without the need to tweak anything, and in this it succeeds. As soon you install Nobara you're ready to go.
@Phi : It's an anecdotal claim, as are most in regards to anything on Linux, but it's an anecdotal claim I can support with my own experience. Nobara is not a stable build.
@Phi I can confirm via my own experiences and can explain why. Nobara insists on two things that have in my experience caused quite a few problems 1. Shipping the bleeding edge mesa-vulkan package in addition to rest of the the stable mesa packages, built by GE themselves 2. Shipping their own nobara package version of many applications like ProtonUp-Qt The bleeding edge mesa-vulkan does mean you get access to cool new things like the graphics pipeline library. However, it has caused me many issues in the past, especially if it's a gaming context that GE does not test for. For example VR can be really good or really terrible depending on the build of mesa-vulkan. ProtonUp-Qt is shipped with Nobara by default, this makes sense and it's not where issues happen. Where issues happen is when these bundled applications aren't updated. Unlike mesa-vulkan which is constantly pushed to the bleeding edge, packages such as ProtonUp-Qt, Supergfxctl and many others ship their own version. Which can mean they end up *really* out of date, and they typically are. ProtonUp-Qt was several versions out of date and wasn't updated because "it wasn't causing issues," until someone finally pointed out that it was actually bugged but no one on the dev team noticed because they personally didn't use this bugged feature. Supergfxctl is also 6 months out of date last I checked from the latest stable build. TL;DR some packages are bleeding edge and that can cause problems, and many packages in the Nobara repo are out of date and that can also cause problems.
Where Nobara has the edge is user experience for people who are looking into switching to Linux. Having all that stuff enabled out of the box and working fine, together with actually helpful help center and UI layout customization can be a deciding factor for a bunch of people.
Agreed, just install a steam game and run it. That's what most users would want. Especially if they're just transitioning from Windows. Make it too hard for them and they will leave.
Ubuntu derivatives have had that edge for much longer. Nobara is one guy's attempt to make an Ubuntu-like distro based on RHEL, which is admirable, but more work than one guy can handle.
@@deusexaethera What edge are you talking about here? Have you even tried Nobara? Just because Ubuntu is more known, doesn't necessarily mean it's the best for individual use case. Benefits for me: based on stable Fedora, good for gaming out of the box, rolling release distro.
Also, the bonus of having the Glorious Eggroll Wine/Proton packages for increased compatibility and performance with Windows games that don't have direct Linux ports. Games like Guild Wars 2, Path of Exile, and more that have large FPS jumps or increases in frame time stability using the GE builds vs the default Valve build. Personally, I'd rather use HoloIS, but that comes with a management tool to download the GE builds, as well. I was actually torn between the two distros before ultimately deciding on HoloISO.
I used to run Nobara on my laptop although I don't really do much gaming or content creation on it. I think Nobara's welcome center and the tweaks that come with it are great especially for those who don't really have time or want to spend time to learn how to change Fedora into a gaming/content creation distro. It's an amazing starter distro for those interested in coming over to Linux but playing games is holding them back on Windows.
My point exactly from other comment: Someone unfamiliar with Linux can come from Windows, click bunch of "Install" buttons in the start app and make it work, without digging how to install what. My takeaway that distros or DE devs should take it how to make more useful welcome app - I don't think GNOME's default is any useful tbh.
@@SirRFI And the default layout of GNOME could stop many former Windows users from using Linux. They'll see it, try to use it, get frustrated, and then leave, thinking Linux is too hard to use, when in reality they've got KDE Plasma and all they have to do is use a different distro like Tuxedo OS, openSUSE or EndeavourOS (the latter is not really for beginners, but it's still better for KDE Plasma users than Kubuntu or Fedora's insultingly bad KDE Spin).
@@cameronbosch1213what's so insultingly bad about the kde spin? I mean, I know that nobera has a much better kde spin, but I don't believe I ever used the vanilla KDE spin.
@@MrGamelover23 It's problematic because of these reasons: 1. It's not vanilla KDE. I mean, first of all (this is minor, but still), it has the Fedora logo instead of the Plasma logo on the application launcher. Discover also doesn't hook well into Fedora, which is a huge problem. 2. It's not even close to stable on ANY computer I've tried, whether it had an AMD GPU or Nvidia. 3. Red Hat. I'm going to just leave that there. 4. Lots and lots of duplicate bloat. Like just as bad as Nobara 5. Fedora is developed with GNOME as the primary DE. They don't really care about anything else. Yeah, _I_ wouldn't use Fedora.
Glad to see Nobara getting some heat. Compared to Steam OS, Garuda Dr4ag0nized, or any other "gaming centric" distribution, I think the devs made some simple choices by making it easier to install Nvidia drivers, codecs, etc. Sure it might take 5-10 minutes extra to do that on Fedora but, how much time would someone "new to Fedora" take to learn how to do that? I think Linux users underestimate how much READING, SEARCHING, WATCHING TUTORIALS you must do to get stuff working.
Exactly. It would have taken me a long time, to have figured it all out. I am much better with linux than when I first installed Nobara in February, but I still have a whole lot to learn, and that takes time. Having things set up was very nice!
Garuda Dragonized and Nobara would be my top choice for gaming-centric distros. It just depends on whether you prefer Arch or Fedora as the base. Nobara is going up the charts. It should be in the top 20 on distrowatch at least (imo) and I'm time I think it will enter the top 20, not that distrowatch is 100% accurate.
@@galacticzombie1942 Yes. That goes double for those who are new to Linux vs those who have a few years experience. There are unknown unknowns for new users. They don't know what they don't know. However, once you learn some very simple keyboard commands and learn to press ⬆️ on the keyboard so you don't have to retype everything.
@@tbui-im8gp Garuda has been smooth and stable for me. Not testing it for gaming though. Only using it on 13' lappy w/o dedicated GPU. Since Valve has switched to Arch base for Steam OS, I can see other Linux users opting to switch to other Arch based distros.
5:10, nobara used to hide the terminal, and it was absolutely horrible, as you had the feeling that it was constantly stuck. Additionally, nobara has had multiple major breakages. I used it from november to december last year. On install I had 2 grub versions mixed. I then had my nvidia drivers completely break twice. One person, or maybe 3-4 is not enough to maintain a distro.
I think the app is good idea, but could be implemented better. I easily ran into situations where the app wasn't responding/froze, because it was "doing something" in the background.
Maybe it's better now? I've been using Nobara since February of this year with no issues. Just installed it and things have worked. I know everyone's case will be different though.
It's not just a time save, it's a *knowledge* save, basically lowers the difficulty curve that normally comes with fedora, which not all noobies would be able to deal with. So essentially, it makes fedora more accessible, you don't need to know that you have to add rpm fusion repos, install all the multimedia codecs, install nvidia drivers (for your gpu it might have been simple but a lot of the time you'll have to manually configure early KMS loading which fedora doesn't do by default iirc, and gl dealing with this as a new user)
Knowledge save is not a good thing, though. You may save some time now, but when something goes wrong you have to start learning everything from absolute scratch.
@@HeDoesNotRow yes but if you want people to get into it in the first place, it's the only way, also nothing should go this wrong and really, not much does anymore, my parents and grandparents have been using it for years now with no issues, in fact I have to help them less than I did with windows
@@HeDoesNotRow Yes but if you're able to get into Linux more easily, you'll find it more enjoyable and want to hurdle those issues because you'll realize, its worth it to stay
I use Nobara for about 2 years. I previously used PopOS, Mint, Arch, Manjaro, Fedora and Endeavor for about 3 years altogether before then. I encountered far fewer bugs with Nobara than any other distro. I mostly use my pretty sick PC for gaming and studies, Nobara for me gives all I need, including Proton GE which I need for the games I play and Lutris /Wine is optimized as well, I did not need to fiddle with any of the games I normally play through Lutris.
Hey, I've never used Linux. Planning to install a distro next week in a NUC that I bought. I was looking to Mint Cinnamon and Fedora KDE. How Mint Cinnamon compare to Nobara KDE?
@@Berecutecu I would reccomend ZorinOS as your first linux distro, I wouldn't reccomend Fedora or Nobara. I don't know much about Linux Mint, but it's quite outdated especially in UI. I would also reccomend the brand new Debian 12 since it's the most stable, but in my opinion your first impression of Linux should be ZorinOS.
Hey nick, nice video, but a few things that you didn't catch: The controller support is indeed stellar for xbox and ps4+ controllers. Ps3 and switch controllers are still hit or miss on fedora, specially the latter. I have two switch oriented controllers and neither worked on fedora, on nobara they worked first try, the steam deck patches also goes a long way for some games, such as hogwarts legacy and jedi survivior (the modmap and amd problems comes to mind) The last thing is about the update button, it isnt a clone from the one in gnome software, it solves broken packages and dependencies in one click without hassle. And the final one is that the configurations for btrfs are already done for you, just plug timeshift and your backup is online. Granted although I've used linux for 5 years I'm still a bit of a noob and these improvements goes a long way in not stressing out about the pc
for me it was just before Windows 7 end of life that i started using linux my first distro was pop os then ubuntu after that manjaro gnome then manjaro kde & now i use endeavouros kde i tried linux mint cinnamon but eos kde is better for me
@@anonforever123 Go with Vanilla OS, especially since now its moving over to Debian. Mint is fine as a general user distro but setting up an NVIDIA GPU properly with it is like its own circle of hell.
@@savagej4y241 really wanted to use Vanilla OS, but it couldn't recognize my AMD GPU and not even the Live USB booted. Therefore here I am using Nobara, which works fine for me. 😅
I experimented with different linux distros for the last year as a complete linux noobie. I started with Manjaro, then Ubuntu/Kubuntu, PopOS, Mint, Endeavour OS but none of them lasted longer than 1 month until I managed to break something (by some mistake I cannot explain or replicate) and the system became unstable. For some of them I had problems with secondary monitor, xbox controller connectivity and even system booting. Only after instaling Nobara everything started working seamlessly for me. I use PC mostly for gaming and web surfing. While Nobara is not as stable and performant as Windows for gaming - for most cases it comes really close or is indistinguishable from Windows experience.
EndeavourOS really only broke for me when the upstream Arch GRUB EFI issue happened. And to be fair to EndeavourOS, they were the first to report it and develop a fix (and they added a systemd-boot option for those users who might want to avoid GRUB and don't use Btrfs like me). I did have to reinstall because the partitions got screwed as I wasn't able to fix it, but other than that, the only other issue I had was the white screen issue on my AMD GPU laptop, and that seems to be the case on ANY distro using GNOME or KDE Plasma, meaning it's likely a Mesa issue.
You're comparing your Fedora setup as "few more actions", but imagine that new user is using linux distro for the first time. It'll be deal breaker for him/her, because a lot of discovery should be done. And it will be a reliave in Nobara.
@@TheLinuxEXP Even for older users it is better. I hopped on Linux back when Slackware was the up-and-comer to Yggdrassil. My first Debian install was during the Hamm/Bo split (libc5 to glibc2). I've compiled my own kernels, killed TTYs all in the pursuit of a few extra kb of RAM saved. Can I tinker with Linux? Yes. Do I want to? No. My hobby interests are elsewhere and these days I want something that "Just Works (tm)". Right now I'm stuck on KUbuntu, even after a year of distro hopping, because I keep running face first into small issues that I consider solved. Arch & Manjaro got the boot because both decided it is A-OK to ship Samba without a configuration. Not even the base config shipped with Samba renamed to force people to configure it on their own. I just want to share a folder via SMB for my tablet to access. Ubuntu (and Debian it looks like) does it with minimal issue and not telling the user to hit up the Samba Git repo to download a file that should already be there! But I want off Ubuntu. I'm tired of ripping things Canonical is dead set on shoving my way (Snaps, yes, I'm talking snaps). I'd go back to Debian but I am not sure if Debian is up to the "Just Works (tm)" standard. Fedora wasn't the last time I tried it. If Nobara does that, even an crusty old Linux fart like me could come to like it.
Went with Nobara for my gaming rig instead of Fedora and then tweaking it from there since I didn't have the time/patience to figure that out as I needed to get it back up and running quickly. So far, Nobara has been great, which was a concern initially as Nobara ran like cap back on version 35 on my laptop but 37 runs great
Seems to me like Nobara's goal is to provide a painless experience for beginners, which it does pretty well. Sure, we can manually do all the tweaks that Nobara does with ease, but for a Linux newbie it could be much more intimidating.
I switched to Nobara just a few days ago so this was a surprise. I switched from Pop!_OS and oh my lord is it so much better. Nvidia drivers would break every reboot and some games just refused to run, and Gnome 43 is nice to have, and the tweaks make life sooo much easier.
@@deusexaethera Every time I'd reboot, sometimes it wouldn't detect the gpu, and sometimes the driver would just fail to work, and I'd have to purge, reboot, install, reboot, and never shut it down again. And I couldn't use hybrid mode because then it would, again, fail to work, so I was stuck on dedicated mode and that is terrible for battery life.
I've been running Pop_OS for 1 year now , but haven't had any issues like breakage, I recently tried nobara os, yeah it is good. And came back to Pop OS. Have you downloaded the specific nvidia version ?
@@sumirandahal76 I don't know what you mean by the "specific" nvidia version, but I used the 525 drivers. I recognise this is not an issue everyone has, but it persisted for me throughout multiple reinstalls, and never really found a solution for.
Two very important metrics are missing from your benchmark: 1% lows and 0.1% lows (in other words, how much does it stutter). I think mangohud can log the frametimes, so that you can use them to calculate these metrics yourself, even if the benchmarks themselfes don't support them. I would use nobara mostly to simplify the setup process a bit. One thing I hate on arch is setting drivers and lib32 up for gaming...
I was just about to say this too. Given, except for Arch any other distros have issues with inconsistent frametime, (despite having just as good or even better Max/Avg FPS compared to Windows). This completely nullifies any gains and features for me as having a stable frametime is crucial for a good gaming experience as your timing and everything else depends on it. Especially in competitive games. Not much of a point of being able to run 200+ fps if your frametime is all over the place, whether it spikes every now and then or is constantly fluctuating (enough) to make it stuttery-ish. Some will probably say something nonsensical as "you're being pretentious", but given in some games few pixels can be the difference between a hit or miss, ergo a win or a loss in some cases, and having (a significant) frametime spike can very easily throw your aim way off than a couple of pixels. Not to mention the position (and motion) of enemies can also be affected. Considering the motion consistency of some of the newest gen monitors, this will become ever more key factor.
I changed Fedora by Nobara just because it was a hell trying to get mp4 codecs working between repos, also reddit has a lot of comments of the same issues with video playing on Fedora, also had the dependencies added saves a lot of time trying to figure the versions to install a common issue with nvidia drivers on Linux
The one thing that I really like about nobara is how they focus the updates around gaming. You will get things like up to date graphics drivers, although it is still on gnome 43 because vrr isnt working yet on 44. I dont have to worry about that breaking in gnome from an update which I appreciate.
Switched to Nobara os nearly half a year back as my first Linux distro and it's been very smooth so far. There hasn't been a game I want to play yet that's playable on Windows but not on this. I've also honestly encountered less bugs in this timespan than I did on Windows 🤔
@@emeukal7683 With the Steam Deck becoming a massive success, Roblox, Destiny 2, and Valorant are going to lose users. I mean, Destiny 2 is already on that path, but just watch.
@Zeft Gaming Windows 10 was usable. Not amazing, but usable. When I tried Windows 11 for the first time since I switched over to Linux full-time in late 2020, it blew my mind on how bad Windows 11 was. Like, it looks like a bad clone of KDE Plasma and Cinnamon put together, and even that's an understatement!
I think you're missing the point, and a few times. "But you can do that yourself, five minutes more" "same thing as you could do with X app" "just three wfhjek to install and a fgeuyfg to apply, nothing too complex" the point is you know all this, and a basic novice doesn't. Unknown unknowns. "There''s an X app? This can be done??". Some "Yeah, Linus, you could just do that in command line, you dummy" vibes. That's the point of this batteries-included approach. The execution needs more work, but it's the right idea.
@@TheLinuxEXPxactly, you should delete this video and remake it with that focus in mind. Glorious egg roll recognized set all the time he was wasting making fedora actually usable wasn't worth it, not even for him, and he literally works at Red Hat. That should tell you how insufferable that "5 to 10 minutes of downloads" is. He gave Fedora the Ubuntu treatment and created an actually usable system on a fresh install. You do great work, but you really dropped the ball here.
Deleting is a bit much, but yes more of the new user experience would have been neat to get into. For me the default ui on nobara, as well as the layout switcher is just perfect for newcomers. And yes, you could patch in vrr, patch your kernel with openrgb support, patch gnome, apply fixes, but new users won't know how to, or frankly they shouldn't need to if they want windows feature parity. I've been running nobara for about half a year, switched to arch on my desktop because why not, but the out of the box experience of nobara is so great I'm still running it on my laptop.
@@TheLinuxEXPYeah! You should as more people like me, who were avid Windows users, are coming to Linux without having any in depth idea, relying on vast community support which includes TH-cam channels like yours. I am not saying that you should not make videos taking expert users in mind but those should be mentioned either in the title or in the description or at the starting of the video and those should be in depth tutorials, not 'Which is best for you' type. But, on the other hand, your videos are good.
As a newer Linux user - I became so frustrated with Fedora that I was ready to delete it and never look back - when I stumbled across Nobara. It still wasn't easy, but it was light years ahead of trying to figure out all the command line nonsense to get Steam / Lutris / Wine up and running. Thanks for reviewing this.
Really nice video. Nobara is a cool project and Fedora is one of my favorite distros. I tried Nobara and it seemed solid but I'm a hobbyist so I like setting things up myself.
Nobara sounds the best for new Linux users, who just decided to move from Mac/Windows and wants at least the start to be smooth and see some results asap, instead of tinkering for a few days. I dunno how it compares to Ubuntu in beginner-friendliness, but based on this channel at least, Ubuntu is not in a good shape right now.
IMO Ubuntu is good at seeming beginner friendly at first, but troubleshooting problems pile up in waves. With derivatives its no different, although Pop! OS is perhaps the least obtrusive among them.
@@savagej4y241 Yea, i could not even try Ubuntu because on my test rig it refused to even install. (tried another Ubuntu-based os which also failed so i suspect the problem is with the Ubuntu base itself)
@@StarfoxHUN Ubuntu and derivatives just refuse to cooperate with some drivers. In my case it was the Realtek microphone related drivers. Tried for weeks to resolve it and eventually gave up on Pop! OS. But other than that Pop! is nice.
I have nobara on my desktop and fedora on my laptop, and I agree that the advantages aren't anything crazy, but it is convenient to have media codecs and other niceties out of the box. Though for an experienced user it's nothing that can't easily be replicated just using fedora.
Glorious Eggroll is an experienced user and he was so tired of fedora's BS that he made his own distro just because all that stuff and experience user can do easily was a giant pain in the butt for him, and a waste of time. Time is valuable, something Linux users don't understand because for them, a computer isn't a tool, it's a toy. The minute Lennox users understand this, the minute Linux can actually be a decent operating system for end users. Without Valve and their Steam Deck, Linux would be held back.
@@cameronbosch1213 That's exactly why they were pushing Linux so hard. Remember when Windows 8 introduced the Microsoft store? Valve realized that if Microsoft did something like make it impossible to publish window software outside of the store, their entire business model is dead. So, in order to give themselves an out in case Windows made selling steam games impossible, they spent a decade pushing Linux. And thank God they did, because even if you don't like Linux, you have to admit that PC gaming being entirely dependent on one operating system isn't good for anybody except Microsoft.
@@MrGamelover23 I agree. That's why I hope Valve does release a Steam Deck 2 with an updated APU soon, because I want competition without having to go back to Windows! (I know they said they wouldn't for a few more years, but the ROG Ally really should make Valve reconsider.)
I switched from Manjaro to Nobara some months ago. I wanted a functional Wayland w/Nvidia, dual monitors and good Steam experience, also good and stable developer workstation. Nobara has been working pretty well for me so far.
My primary reason for nobara: nautilus comes with type-ahead search (the usual fix to get it is a ppa, thus only applicable on ubuntu etc, not on fedora)
Honestly this seems excellent! Fedora without nearly as much setup just to get to square 1, and 1-click layout customization ala Zorin OS and Manjaro GNOME are big selling points to me. And if those don't work, vanilla GNOME and KDE options? I'm gonna try this soon. Thanks for the info!
Fedora is a great and stable release. I did try Nobara out of curiosity on my gaming computer and it was working fine out of the box. Steam worked and I was playing my games in no time. Then, came the software center notifications about the Nvidia driver updates. I decided since experience was good up to this point, why not update this way (I was coming from Arch and was used to updating via the terminal). Well, big mistake. The application got stuck in a neverending loop of downloading the appropriate drivers, installing, getting an error, rolling back and starting over again. The most annoying part is that the pop up to update was not going away. It overlapped everything and didn't go away. Even after using dnf in terminal. I'm back on Arch, lol.
I hoped you would elaborate on the package manager and repos subject. To my limited understanding, Nobara uses regular Fedora repositories, but also their own at the same time. That said it's recommended to actually use it over other things, including simple `sudo dnf update -y` in terminal, as this might lead to problems or even brick the OS, like I did after some months on my test VM by running just that command. I might be also wrong, as I didn't do any extended testing or research. I do agree that even though Nobara might be more convenient at first, and generally better due to patched kernel and whatnot, it may also suffer from delayed updates or stability, for example just because something updated the wrong way and desynced. Would love to hear from long time users though.
I'm pretty excited about this one. I've got an SSD coming in that I plan on setting up to dual boot linux next to my windows PC and this distro checks all the boxes I've been browsing around for.
I've been stuck with nobara for a half year already and is the only distro I've seen yet that respects my sudden change in graphics choice on my laptop without having to get stuck on just my dedicated nvidia gpu.
you forgot to mention the steam app isn't a flatpak, it's a repo maintained by nobara, also a lot of gaming-specific apps have nobara repo versions instead of flatpaks.
It is easy to fix the "eleven" layout where menu is in the wrong location: Go to extension manager, open dash to panel settings, move "center box" to the top.
From my understanding is that the developer want a Linux distro for his dad that would be easy to use and look similar to windows. Which is probably why some things are duplicated like the package manager. To be honest I would rather just have one place where I can download and install programs. That's why I first started to use the terminal and now I am trying out the nix package manager. The one thing I wish this had is secure boot like Fedora. I wonder if it's also optimized for touchscreens when using the KDE desktop. I might give this a try and my surface go and see how it works. The way I see it Nobara is kinda like Pop_Os where it's just a remake/spin on Ubuntu/Debian but with some tweaks to make it a bit more user friendly, but it's using Fedora as it's base.
@@solarwind97 Joshua Strobl (former Solus co-lead) resigned in Jan 2022 to work on updating Budgie. That's essentially why Solus died. If one person leaving the project to pursue other projects means the viability of a distro fork goes with them, then its a highly vulnerable fork.
@@solarwind97 That being said, what Nobara offers out of the box is so good from a Windows refugee standpoint that its worth supporting just so that hopefully by the time Nobara eventually goes like Solus did, Fedora will have improved new user experience enough to switch.
I’m with you on this, I don’t understand the heavy customizations of the look and feel on gnome. The only set of change that I appreciate tho is the Nautilus ones. Start typing and you have search. Toggling between breadcrumb and text in the navigation bar is great because on vanilla gnome it’s a pita (Ctrl+L) they also mentioned fixing the drag+drop issues but I didn’t have the chance to test it
The main thing I have against Nobara (and why I went with Fedora) is because GE takes too long to roll out updates. Fedora 38 came out in April, but Nobara didn't move to F38 until the end of August. At the end of the day I can configure Fedora for gaming in under an hour, having to wait months for updates is a dealbreaker for me.
Im a gamer first and a linux enthusiast second. Theres nothing worse than wanting to try out a game with your friends and having to say "I cant get this game to run" when everone is waiting on you to play. With nobara, these moments are few and far between compared to previous distros I have tried. I have been daily driving Nobara for about a year and I can say that 80% of my steam library works and runs well. Basically I can trust that any Silver or higher rated game on ProtonDB will usually work with minimal troubleshooting. Still, im looking forward to the day it is 100% so i can drop my dual both with windows. But until then, ill be sticking with Nobara.
As someone who is curious about finally making the switch to Linux on my main gaming PC and setting my PC up on the TV more often, I can't wait for your htpc build video.
I am a big fan of Fedora, but I had to recently switch to Nobara because Flatpak OBS wasn't able to capture my screen anymore ! It was working fine on Ubuntu and Fedora 37, so I assume it's a problem with Fedora 38 and some Nvidia driver. And as I use my computer for doing music composition livestreams many times per week, this was a big no-no for me ! After many failed attempts and complete reinstall, Nobara worked out of the box in my use case, so I will stick with Nobara as long as the problem persists with Fedora. I'm not a fan of all the additional stuff and programs, as I prefer to install them myself and use the terminal, but on the display side, it is fluid as hell on my setup. So a good distro, that is more than just Fedora with some tweaks ! It is Fedora with less restrictive principles, which is good for today's content creators. P.S. : content de voir qu'une des grosses chaînes françaises sur Linux est tenue par un compatriote :) J'aime beaucoup ton travail, et ça m'inspire à me battre pour utiliser exclusivement Linux pour produire mes morceaux, malgré les désavantages qui persistent !
I'm on Nobara for a half of a year as my first distro now, outdated GPUs runs pretty well after manual installation of its drivers (390xx for my current GTS 450 for example). Not so smooth as with bleeding edge cards but pretty well for a newcomer like me. I even play games here.
@@turanamo nobara allows you to install 515 and later through its automatic app, for outdated drivers I found fedora guides and installed them under nouveau
The problem is instead of having your vendor be a huge community that has existed for two decades, you're instead giving that responsibility to a much smaller one that has only recently started. There is much more to a GNU/Linux distro than just benchmark performances. And going by their already fairly small track record, it doesn't seem very trust worthy to have it as an operating system on a computer (mashup of SELinux and AppArmor, kernels are not signed, lack of good QA like making a release and immediately releasing subsequent hotfix releases because everything went wrong, etc)
Hi! You're one of my favourite linux youtubers. I'm torn between Arch distros and Nobara. I ran both and I love both. I benchmarked Endeavour os and Nobara today with Shadow of the Tomb Raider, that I ran on Heroic games launcher using Proton experimental with Esync, Fsync, and Gamemode on. My box is 5800X3D with 16 gigs of memory running @3200 the vidcard is an msi 6750 gaming X Trio and Nobara won by 11%! Go Nobara!
Whatever Nobara adds on top of Fedora can be added to a fedora install within 5-10 mins EACH! U can disable what u don't need on Nobara fairly easily but to get the extra features on Fedora it does take little time BUT u need to keep in mind the cumulative time taken to get all your required enhancements AND the time taken to get to know how to make those changes in Fedora. I love Fedora's clean experience and constant updates but making all sorts of changes to have a better experience with it is a hassle. Simply saying Nobara has this but Fedora can also just by spending 5 mins is NOT fair imo.
My biggest selling point for nobara was the driver support. Fedora didn't know the touchpad of my laptop, so I couldn't right-click on it. On nobara it works just fine
I use nobara on my gaming pc and fedora on my thinkpad. Nobara is perfect for gaming out of the box. It genuinely take less time to start gaming on nobara than it does on a fresh windows install for me.
13:00 "so you never have to figure them out for yourself" . . . Yeah totally, figuring this stuff out for a lot of people can take hours. - even searching and experimenting with those extensions.
right now im using nobara 38 (switching from pop os) and so far the experience is great, games are working after doing few changes and the only gripe that i found (probably because of my nvidia card) is some strange artifacts stutters but after switching from wayland into x11 the experience is wonderful, im temping to remove my windows installation but I will try for a month first thx for all your videos
Running the KDE version and on X11 it's fantastic, Wayland is still to buggy for my 3070 atm. I've been pretty happy with it so far and even got to upgrade the fedora base before Nobara 38 was released, It did cause some weird stuff, but nothing that made it unusable. The ease of use in terms of gaming and the quality that GE delivers is fenomenal, as he has said many times, it's a hobby distro... And that's how it should be treated as well. It's for making your gaming easier, not exceptionally faster. Glad you covered this :)
I have a 3070 and I am running Nobara on Wayland. The only real consistent buggyness that I am experiencing is some Electron apps flickering, or some context menus being black half the time. But other than that, it is a pretty smooth experience.
I think you are missing the point on the startup app. At 5:12 you said that the post-installation app saves 5-10 minutes and that's it. It can be true for you - experienced user, who already know how to "properly" install say NVIDIA drivers, Steam or DaVinci Resolve. However, inexperienced users or even those who simply never installed these specific things before, might waste way more time and run into issues - every now and then I see people asking how to install Steam, because whatever they did ended up in error. Maybe Linus wouldn't uninstall GNOME if he tried Nobara. Likewise, simple customization options like layout selector is something that people may be interested in after installing a system. I would argue that most people who switch from Windows to Linux with gaming as one of major concerns - they'll still want some form of "taskbar". I know this kinda goes against how GNOME developers intend the DE to be used, but at the same time I get the impression that "dash" related extensions are one of most popular ones. The point is: I think it's actually useful first start app that most people might be interested in, unlike GNOME's default one which in my opinion is next to useless. Though I agree that Nobara's app could be developed better - feels clunky, sometimes freezes or even crashes, at least as far I tested it. I am one of those who requested Nobara review, but I thought you'll not only approach it as experienced Fedora user, but also from newcomer perspective and what Desktop Environments or distros can learn from it.
I used Nobara for quite a while but I switched back to Arch (btw) because Nobara is a one-man show and nobody knows how long GE can maintain such a distro. For example Firefox always lacks behind the Fedora Package because of some non-free codecs that nobara ships with Firefox, to me a browser is crucial and I do not wanna rely on a single guy maintaining these things. For gaming with a AMD gpu Nobara is great out of the box. I was a little bit scared if I can handle all the gaming stuff on Arch but it was easy with the AUR and some reading. I use the zen kernel, still AMD gpu, so no driver f*ckup, mangohud git from AUR, protonup-qt for custom proton by GE and this works like a charm with no issues at all. One really good advantage in Nobara is, that it ships default GNOME with VRR patches to use AMDs FreeSync. As these patches are outdated in the AUR atm I needed to make a decision to stay at GNOME 43, update to GNOME 44 without VRR or use KDE which handles VRR very well by default - I switched to KDE with little to no issues with Wayland btw. I like the Fedora Eco System but I think gaming machines should always be up2date which includes the drivers and these are part of the kernel, which distro ships kernel updates faster than Arch? ... But don't get me wrong, Nobara has it's points, I liked it but I like freedom of chosing things I want to use and what not, for example I really dont care about Blender or OBS studio, why ship it by default? It's bloat for most of the ppl, anyways it's hard to satisfy all the ppl with a distro, GE's doing a great job and helps pushing Linux gaming even to people who otherwise would stick on shitty window$
Hello Nick, Well, I guess Nobara's gains about gaming being not really significant comparing to Fedora could be explained because the current version is based on Fedora 37 ? Maybe you could to some benchmarking for Fedora 37 against Nobara 37 or for Nobara 38 against Fedora 38 when the former will be available ? Best
I started using Fedora when I switched to Linux, and literally couldn't use my PC for two weeks because of Nvidia driver issues (tutorials didn't help) and other problems. I then switched to Nobara, and it was amazing! I didn't have to enable any repos or codecs - everything was just ready to use. To this day, I still use Nobara, and I absolutely love it. There are actually a couple of weird bugs that I've encountered, which seem to be unique to my setup, but since the team is pretty small, I'm willing to overlook them. Honestly, I can live with a couple of non-critical bugs in order to use Nobara.
I'm currently using it on my PC. As far as I can tell, you could just treat it as a Fedora that is more ready ootb for gaming and content creation, or just general use as you don't need to mess around with rpm-fusion and whatever, with a weekly update schedule (barring hotfixes and distro upgrade). They have come a long way, I started out with the early versions where they are pretty buggy, needed hotfixes all the time (one time even a reinstall back in the very early days), and it isn't particularly clear yet how it would shape up. Now? I think I outright want this as an Immutable distro where I could just stick it in my work/personal laptop and forget about it. An achievement considering I'm an Arch refugee who went to Ubuntu LTS after all the Arch kerfuffle last year. Although, there IS an Ubuntu version of Nobara called PikaOS that is quite interesting as well. The project seems to be on friendly terms with Nobara given it has a channel on GE's Discord server. But I hope uBlue makes an image based on Nobara because I really, really want it.
A year after this video and I'm here watching this video while running Nobara. Here are my thoughts: It's a perfect distribution for my personal needs, as someone who's main computer use is gaming, programming and artwork. I'm using the KDE edition of the distro, and have configured it to my heart's content. I've been playing all sorts of games, whether they be on Steam, Lutris or having their own wine config. I've also been developing my own games with Godot and Bevy, drawing things with Krita and generally making daily use of this distribution. I've been looking for the right distribution for a few years, repeatedly installing a distribution, trying it, falling short and returning to windows in defeat. Having done lots of testing over time, I can confirm however that Nobara is stable enough for my needs, and I'm making the full switch to it over the next few days
I've been running Nobara and fedora on two separate laptops for about 6 months. They've both been generally reliable, however after the last update I'd say something in Fedora changed for the worse and its corrupting partitions and having to use scan disk to fix them up for some reason (mainly NTFS formatted partitions). Even rolling back a couple of updates doesn't seem to fix it. Its affected Nobara as well (where I first noticed it). Previous to that, I've been finding Nobara a lot more stable than when it first came out. The battery life on it is superb compared to other distros - I can put the laptop to sleep and it will sit there for about 2 weeks before running out of power (instead of 2hrs LOL). NVidia drivers installed without issue and lots of useful apps included by default. The package manager is a little weird to use, but once you get used to it, it works well enough. Nobara also fixed (or hid) a lot of the error messages I was getting with Fedora on this laptop. The error messages were nonsensical in that they told you nothing of the error other than email the kernel maintainers (again with no info on how to do this). One thing I would say with either is support. I haven't been able to find a support forum for Nobara. The forum for Fedora is unofficial and community driven. Its also a lot harder to get answers there than other distro forums that I've been to. So take that into consideration if you need more help than you can find with a Google search.
Please remember - your comments about how long things will take to replicate, are based upon your vast experience and expertise in Linux in general. Not everyone is able to learn and remember things as well as you do. Nobara takes that headache away. Thank you for your content - always enjoyable and informative.
i tried nobara on a whim one time about a year ago. fired up overwatch which is one of like three games i play nowadays and i got an absurd framerate out of it. it was something like 350fps when the usual framerate for every other distro was something like 200. suffice to say i was sold. unfortunately i'm not getting that now on OW2 but i'm just using the wine version lutrus gave me so there's probably room for improvement. pro tip for everybody using nobara, use the "update & sync" app. don't just "dnf update". nobara is more or less rolling unlike fedora and dnf alone doesn't always handle repo changes and stuff properly. never use the DE software centres either for system updates for the same reasons.
@@SirRFI very generally speaking linux vs windows for gaming goes like this. on linux, windows games are run through a comparability layer. that loses some performance. however, on low end machines, linux can still come out with better performance because of the lower overhead of the OS. and it still varies from game to game. if literally all one cares about is playing vidyuh then it's best to just use windows on a standard PC.
Nobara looks interesting to me. I use Windows but have some experience with Linux Servers. My goal is to switch to Linux until Win 10 EOL. I've installed Arch for that purpose because I liked the idea of a rolling distro and the AUR. That said, I'm considering switching to Nobara - after reading that they've added patches and tweaks to make gaming work better, I thought that might be a good idea, because I can't be bothered to look up and apply the patches manually. I'm sure I have enough Linux experience to get it done but I just want to use my daily driver PC, not tinker with it like it's a hobby project.
Somewhat similar perspective, except my goal is switching to Linux BY Win10 EOL. Win11 is problematic in so many ways that its a total no-go. I'd expect most browsers to support Win10 past 2025 like they did for Win7 three years past the official EOL date, but even then that's 5 years left to ditch Windows forever.
Watching this video from my freshly installed Nobara on desktop. The only real issue I'm having is that my drives other than the boot drive don't seem to be automatically mounting on startup, regardless of being set to do so on Disks. But I'm pretty sure there's something I'm missing. Beyond all that, I tought I was going to need more time to transfer my workflow from Windows, figuring out what is available and what has better options, but it's been a week and the only thing I haven't really resolved yet is transfering the mess of notes I have on Notion to Obsidian and it has nothing to do with Nobara. In the end, getting used to this environment I already feel more at home than with any OS I used before.
Personally, being a professional 3D animator and wanting to use Maya and Blender with Optix/Cuda, and do some editing on Resolve, and casual gamin on my favorite games which many are AAA games and/or online. All that on a stable system that doesn't require tinkering to make it work, even though I'm not against it sometimes for fun when I want to. In these regards, Nobara sounds like an ideal distro. I know the experienced Linuxians might disagree with the idea, but having a distro that does a lot of the job for you is quite a big deal. I know I can install drivers myself, or customize things easily in 10-15 min. But that's only as fast and simple when I am familiar with what I can do and how, which isn't a given to everyone, and at the end of the day: if there's a distro that can get me to the same point with less demand from me, I'm all for it and I bet I'm not the only one. I've tried a few distros in the past, mainly Debian based but also vanilla Fedora and Manjaro, and I ended up quitting all of them because I ended up spending too much time just trying to set up and understand my system instead of just using it for what I needed. I especially had troubles getting Cuda/Optix accelerations to function in my 3D apps, and all the help I could get about it was to distro-jump to some arch distro or chug down pages of manuals, which is exactly what I don't want. I need a system for doing my job and leisure on, not for getting a challenge. The only smooth Linux experience I got so far was using old Centos distros at work, but that's precisely because it's managed by the company and not by me, everything is ready and functionnal and I'm left with the pleasure of just using the system and tinkering for extras only when I want to instead of being forced to do it.
i was drawn to this video because i was frustrated with my previous build of arch-based garuda. i was brought up on arch, and tried to stick with the rolling release community driven model, but more than once, garuda in particular caused a system crash that required loss of power to reset and corrupted various components of my dedicated /home partition. i wiped my entire drive and moved from garuda to nobara, reasoning that i just wanted something that was stable and had graphical options for package management, that way i didn't have to re-learn niche terminal commands and could get up and running quickly. this was about 3 days ago, so i can't speak for long-term stability, but it really provides a polished and user-friendly experience out of the box. i could give this to my tech-illiterate mom and she could figure it out
Being Linux noob, I think Nobara does a great job not by saving time, but offering an easy way to install gaming soft without need of searching the Internet.
This vid's a year old, but just throwing this out there. As someone who just began using Linux just two days ago I can't stress enough that it is absolutely NOT "just 5 or 10 minutes". It's at least 30 minutes. Your pre-existing knowledge and experience is pulling major weight. 👍
I got so excited when I saw the title of this video!! I've been using Nobara on my laptop for a couple months now and I enjoy it. I was considering moving to Fedora; I have Nobara set up to look like vanilla Gnome anyway, and I have stability concerns since it's a hobby distro. But, I'm happy to see there is actually a performance difference in gaming, and I agree that having a guarentee that the distro will be made so gaming "just works" is great. My laptop is older, so I'll take any boost in gaming performance I can get. Also, that was a good point about using Xorg on Nobara, because I was getting really strange performance issues in games on Wayland. Nobara should probably default to Xorg until those issues on Wayland are ironed out. Could just be my hardware though, it has an Nvidia GPU.
I'm surprised to hear you managed to get the Xbox Series controller working, I never managed to get it to connect via Bluetooth on Linux ever since I bought it :D I have XpadNeo installed, am on Nobara now.
I'm an experienced linux user of many years. After finally making the full switch for desktop (MS is getting too scummy to justify, what were they thinking with Recall?!), I distro hopped a bunch trying to find a convenient gaming experience. I want to do things with my PC, not to it. Nobara ended that distro hopping. Every game I try works ootb, no fussing. I think that's the real experience Nobara is going for, regardless of FPS, intial setup time saves, or any other metric. It's nice to see "it just works" being prioritized in the linux space.
As much as I love Linux, sometimes it's nice to new-boot into a distro and not have to do a bunch of arcane hunting and adjusting. I've been wanting to move my Nitro 5 from Win 11 since I bought it last year, but I've hesitated because I didn't want to lose out on gaming time because of having to figure things out for days, or at worst, go back to Win 11. I've looked at Garuda, but I feel better now about Nobara. Thanks for this video. And yes, from what I've seen, the new Nobara release addresses those DaVinci Resolve issues you mentioned.
I use nobara cause I'm a Linux noob, and all the little things you mention that it does to save you 5 minutes, saves someone who doesn't know what they're doing a lot more time, and effort, and possibly breaking their distro in some way they don't understand how to fix. If you know what you're doing with Linux, then yeah, Nobara probably isn't a big deal.
It's also important to add that Glorious Eggroll is a current (or former?) RedHat employee so he most likely have better understanding on the Fedora internals and definitely know what he is doing.
Theres been no other linux distro that I love using consistently. Nobara works straight of the box, but it also works as my software development platform, it just works for me!!
I'm using Nobara for the last few weeks and it's awesome. It work in my hybrid laptop (i7+RTX) almost out of the box. Just install the drivers and you are good to go. It looks pretty cool too.
GREAT review/comparison video! My experience between Fedora/Nobara was very similar to yours, except that I had some really frustrating issues on Nobara making Dark Mode unusable for LibreOffice and a few others. I switched back to Fedora and much prefer it to Nobara as I just have far less issues in Fedora (which just works purrfectly). I expect that eventually Nobara will fix many of the issues I had with it and then I will probably switch to it.
its great for ppl who wants a complete multimedia distro ootb, i applied some tweaks from nobara myself. Not a lot of stuff in their repo unfortunately, guaranteed to have missing dep, but atleast GE respond fast to any gaming needs, just gaming tho
I had Fedora 36/37 on an Asus Optimus laptop, and it was a nightmare. Optimus was constantly causing problems, with games sometimes only running on the internal GPU, or only running on the external GPU if and only if I played on an external monitor. Installed PopOS, and 90% of my problems were gone. Nobara's easy DaVinci install is appealing, but I know older versions of DaVinci had lousy codec support due to licensing restrictions.
I have one little question/complaint. Why didn't you use the GE Proton on Nobara when comparing to what you get OOB with Fedora? That's part of the reason the OS exists.
This is what I'm using now (because I got sick of waiting on Zorin to update). It works fantastically. I have had issues, but I have a suspicion they're all Wayland related and I would have seen the same problems in Fedora. Namely: Calibre viewer won't open (so I use a different epub viewer), when coming out of sleep mode the desktop seems to get confused about dash-to-dock and doesn't restore the windows perfectly (oh well, I just click to fix them), Chromium was miserably choppy (switched to Firefox), there was a weird problem with large text files not opening (eventually started working, maybe it was the reinstall of the package I did?) I do like the distro. I don't play AAA games because those suck and are money/timesyncs, but all the normal games I've tried work great.
@@TheLinuxEXP indeed you should. I've been running fedora and Wayland was giving me a lot of problems that immediately just disappeared when switching to X11. At least on kde with nvidia Wayland doesn't seem quite bulletproof yet.
How is the hybrid GPU setup on your laptop? I've had trouble with my 4600H/1650Ti laptop, such as being unable to share displays over HDMI without custom drivers, difficulty setting fan speeds, and installing displayLink drivers (to shared display over USB 3) absolutely ruined my performance even after uninstalling the drivers :( I've heard AMD-nVidia graphics aren't as graceful with hybrid graphics but I really don't want to give money to Intel, especially when the laptop I have is already perfectly fine for what I need it for. A lot of this was xorg apparently but sadly Pop doesn't offer Wayland yet, so maybe Fedora/Nobara would fix!
I wonder if, because one of the things that gets patched and updated faster is the mesa drivers, if the benchmark results would have more of a gap on AMD / Intel.
I don't agree with any of you who says that Nobara is only for gaming. Indeed makes the gaming experience more affordable, but it became my daily driver since last year (Nobara 36) and never looked back. No more distro hopping... I lied i hopped from Nobara Official to Nobara KDE 😂
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Windows is better than all of them 💩🐧💩
Can you please do a review on regataOS 24 I’m trying to find a decent comparison between nobara and that
The goal of Nobara isn't to give more FPS in games, the goal is to be ready for gaming out of the box and run as many games as possible without the need to tweak anything, and in this it succeeds. As soon you install Nobara you're ready to go.
wow, that's awesome!!
*as long as nothing goes dramatically wrong, which is surprisingly common
@Phi : It's an anecdotal claim, as are most in regards to anything on Linux, but it's an anecdotal claim I can support with my own experience. Nobara is not a stable build.
@Phi I can confirm via my own experiences and can explain why.
Nobara insists on two things that have in my experience caused quite a few problems
1. Shipping the bleeding edge mesa-vulkan package in addition to rest of the the stable mesa packages, built by GE themselves
2. Shipping their own nobara package version of many applications like ProtonUp-Qt
The bleeding edge mesa-vulkan does mean you get access to cool new things like the graphics pipeline library. However, it has caused me many issues in the past, especially if it's a gaming context that GE does not test for. For example VR can be really good or really terrible depending on the build of mesa-vulkan.
ProtonUp-Qt is shipped with Nobara by default, this makes sense and it's not where issues happen. Where issues happen is when these bundled applications aren't updated. Unlike mesa-vulkan which is constantly pushed to the bleeding edge, packages such as ProtonUp-Qt, Supergfxctl and many others ship their own version. Which can mean they end up *really* out of date, and they typically are.
ProtonUp-Qt was several versions out of date and wasn't updated because "it wasn't causing issues," until someone finally pointed out that it was actually bugged but no one on the dev team noticed because they personally didn't use this bugged feature. Supergfxctl is also 6 months out of date last I checked from the latest stable build.
TL;DR some packages are bleeding edge and that can cause problems, and many packages in the Nobara repo are out of date and that can also cause problems.
So basically, it's trying to be THE windows killer
Where Nobara has the edge is user experience for people who are looking into switching to Linux. Having all that stuff enabled out of the box and working fine, together with actually helpful help center and UI layout customization can be a deciding factor for a bunch of people.
Agreed, just install a steam game and run it. That's what most users would want. Especially if they're just transitioning from Windows. Make it too hard for them and they will leave.
Ubuntu derivatives have had that edge for much longer. Nobara is one guy's attempt to make an Ubuntu-like distro based on RHEL, which is admirable, but more work than one guy can handle.
@@deusexaethera
What edge are you talking about here? Have you even tried Nobara? Just because Ubuntu is more known, doesn't necessarily mean it's the best for individual use case. Benefits for me: based on stable Fedora, good for gaming out of the box, rolling release distro.
@@tbui-im8gp I personally use crystal linux for gaming
Also, the bonus of having the Glorious Eggroll Wine/Proton packages for increased compatibility and performance with Windows games that don't have direct Linux ports. Games like Guild Wars 2, Path of Exile, and more that have large FPS jumps or increases in frame time stability using the GE builds vs the default Valve build. Personally, I'd rather use HoloIS, but that comes with a management tool to download the GE builds, as well. I was actually torn between the two distros before ultimately deciding on HoloISO.
I used to run Nobara on my laptop although I don't really do much gaming or content creation on it. I think Nobara's welcome center and the tweaks that come with it are great especially for those who don't really have time or want to spend time to learn how to change Fedora into a gaming/content creation distro. It's an amazing starter distro for those interested in coming over to Linux but playing games is holding them back on Windows.
Yeah, it’s a good niche distro!
My point exactly from other comment: Someone unfamiliar with Linux can come from Windows, click bunch of "Install" buttons in the start app and make it work, without digging how to install what. My takeaway that distros or DE devs should take it how to make more useful welcome app - I don't think GNOME's default is any useful tbh.
@@SirRFI And the default layout of GNOME could stop many former Windows users from using Linux. They'll see it, try to use it, get frustrated, and then leave, thinking Linux is too hard to use, when in reality they've got KDE Plasma and all they have to do is use a different distro like Tuxedo OS, openSUSE or EndeavourOS (the latter is not really for beginners, but it's still better for KDE Plasma users than Kubuntu or Fedora's insultingly bad KDE Spin).
@@cameronbosch1213what's so insultingly bad about the kde spin? I mean, I know that nobera has a much better kde spin, but I don't believe I ever used the vanilla KDE spin.
@@MrGamelover23 It's problematic because of these reasons:
1. It's not vanilla KDE. I mean, first of all (this is minor, but still), it has the Fedora logo instead of the Plasma logo on the application launcher. Discover also doesn't hook well into Fedora, which is a huge problem.
2. It's not even close to stable on ANY computer I've tried, whether it had an AMD GPU or Nvidia.
3. Red Hat. I'm going to just leave that there.
4. Lots and lots of duplicate bloat. Like just as bad as Nobara
5. Fedora is developed with GNOME as the primary DE. They don't really care about anything else.
Yeah, _I_ wouldn't use Fedora.
Glad to see Nobara getting some heat. Compared to Steam OS, Garuda Dr4ag0nized, or any other "gaming centric" distribution, I think the devs made some simple choices by making it easier to install Nvidia drivers, codecs, etc.
Sure it might take 5-10 minutes extra to do that on Fedora but, how much time would someone "new to Fedora" take to learn how to do that? I think Linux users underestimate how much READING, SEARCHING, WATCHING TUTORIALS you must do to get stuff working.
Exactly. It would have taken me a long time, to have figured it all out. I am much better with linux than when I first installed Nobara in February, but I still have a whole lot to learn, and that takes time. Having things set up was very nice!
Garuda Dragonized and Nobara would be my top choice for gaming-centric distros. It just depends on whether you prefer Arch or Fedora as the base. Nobara is going up the charts. It should be in the top 20 on distrowatch at least (imo) and I'm time I think it will enter the top 20, not that distrowatch is 100% accurate.
@@galacticzombie1942 Yes. That goes double for those who are new to Linux vs those who have a few years experience. There are unknown unknowns for new users. They don't know what they don't know. However, once you learn some very simple keyboard commands and learn to press ⬆️ on the keyboard so you don't have to retype everything.
@@tbui-im8gp Garuda has been smooth and stable for me. Not testing it for gaming though. Only using it on 13' lappy w/o dedicated GPU. Since Valve has switched to Arch base for Steam OS, I can see other Linux users opting to switch to other Arch based distros.
@@Logan5Greye I actually hadn't figured that one out. lol. Thank you. Still learning, and love to learn!
5:10, nobara used to hide the terminal, and it was absolutely horrible, as you had the feeling that it was constantly stuck.
Additionally, nobara has had multiple major breakages. I used it from november to december last year. On install I had 2 grub versions mixed. I then had my nvidia drivers completely break twice. One person, or maybe 3-4 is not enough to maintain a distro.
A graphical progress bar would be better though. Probably more work to implement, though
@@TheLinuxEXP That's exactly what used to be there, it was just horribly implemented, so he probably ditched it
I think the app is good idea, but could be implemented better. I easily ran into situations where the app wasn't responding/froze, because it was "doing something" in the background.
Maybe it's better now? I've been using Nobara since February of this year with no issues. Just installed it and things have worked. I know everyone's case will be different though.
One person isn’t maintaining a distro, though? They’re maintaining a set of out-of-the-box configurations and isos for the Fedora distro, right?
It's not just a time save, it's a *knowledge* save, basically lowers the difficulty curve that normally comes with fedora, which not all noobies would be able to deal with. So essentially, it makes fedora more accessible, you don't need to know that you have to add rpm fusion repos, install all the multimedia codecs, install nvidia drivers (for your gpu it might have been simple but a lot of the time you'll have to manually configure early KMS loading which fedora doesn't do by default iirc, and gl dealing with this as a new user)
True!
Knowledge save is not a good thing, though. You may save some time now, but when something goes wrong you have to start learning everything from absolute scratch.
@@HeDoesNotRow yes but if you want people to get into it in the first place, it's the only way, also nothing should go this wrong and really, not much does anymore, my parents and grandparents have been using it for years now with no issues, in fact I have to help them less than I did with windows
Time is knowledge.
@@HeDoesNotRow Yes but if you're able to get into Linux more easily, you'll find it more enjoyable and want to hurdle those issues because you'll realize, its worth it to stay
I use Nobara for about 2 years. I previously used PopOS, Mint, Arch, Manjaro, Fedora and Endeavor for about 3 years altogether before then. I encountered far fewer bugs with Nobara than any other distro. I mostly use my pretty sick PC for gaming and studies, Nobara for me gives all I need, including Proton GE which I need for the games I play and Lutris /Wine is optimized as well, I did not need to fiddle with any of the games I normally play through Lutris.
Hey, I've never used Linux. Planning to install a distro next week in a NUC that I bought. I was looking to Mint Cinnamon and Fedora KDE. How Mint Cinnamon compare to Nobara KDE?
@@Berecutecu I would reccomend ZorinOS as your first linux distro, I wouldn't reccomend Fedora or Nobara.
I don't know much about Linux Mint, but it's quite outdated especially in UI.
I would also reccomend the brand new Debian 12 since it's the most stable, but in my opinion your first impression of Linux should be ZorinOS.
@Alexandre-tk1gr Just get nobara 39 pick kde or gnome see what you like don't waste your time with other distro.
@@BerecutecuYour picks were good, Nobara if you want to play games, otherwise Mint Cinnamon is perfectly fine.
Hey nick, nice video, but a few things that you didn't catch:
The controller support is indeed stellar for xbox and ps4+ controllers. Ps3 and switch controllers are still hit or miss on fedora, specially the latter. I have two switch oriented controllers and neither worked on fedora, on nobara they worked first try, the steam deck patches also goes a long way for some games, such as hogwarts legacy and jedi survivior (the modmap and amd problems comes to mind)
The last thing is about the update button, it isnt a clone from the one in gnome software, it solves broken packages and dependencies in one click without hassle.
And the final one is that the configurations for btrfs are already done for you, just plug timeshift and your backup is online.
Granted although I've used linux for 5 years I'm still a bit of a noob and these improvements goes a long way in not stressing out about the pc
Thanks for the precisions!
for me it was just before Windows 7 end of life that i started using linux my first distro was pop os then ubuntu after that manjaro gnome then manjaro kde & now i use endeavouros kde i tried linux mint cinnamon but eos kde is better for me
@@anonforever123 Go with Vanilla OS, especially since now its moving over to Debian. Mint is fine as a general user distro but setting up an NVIDIA GPU properly with it is like its own circle of hell.
@@savagej4y241 really wanted to use Vanilla OS, but it couldn't recognize my AMD GPU and not even the Live USB booted. Therefore here I am using Nobara, which works fine for me. 😅
@@t1r1g0n Thank you for letting me know! I will avoid Vanilla OS for systems with AMD GPUs in that case!
I experimented with different linux distros for the last year as a complete linux noobie. I started with Manjaro, then Ubuntu/Kubuntu, PopOS, Mint, Endeavour OS but none of them lasted longer than 1 month until I managed to break something (by some mistake I cannot explain or replicate) and the system became unstable. For some of them I had problems with secondary monitor, xbox controller connectivity and even system booting. Only after instaling Nobara everything started working seamlessly for me. I use PC mostly for gaming and web surfing.
While Nobara is not as stable and performant as Windows for gaming - for most cases it comes really close or is indistinguishable from Windows experience.
EndeavourOS really only broke for me when the upstream Arch GRUB EFI issue happened. And to be fair to EndeavourOS, they were the first to report it and develop a fix (and they added a systemd-boot option for those users who might want to avoid GRUB and don't use Btrfs like me). I did have to reinstall because the partitions got screwed as I wasn't able to fix it, but other than that, the only other issue I had was the white screen issue on my AMD GPU laptop, and that seems to be the case on ANY distro using GNOME or KDE Plasma, meaning it's likely a Mesa issue.
You're comparing your Fedora setup as "few more actions", but imagine that new user is using linux distro for the first time. It'll be deal breaker for him/her, because a lot of discovery should be done. And it will be a reliave in Nobara.
Yeah for new users it’s definitely much easier!
@@TheLinuxEXP Even for older users it is better. I hopped on Linux back when Slackware was the up-and-comer to Yggdrassil. My first Debian install was during the Hamm/Bo split (libc5 to glibc2). I've compiled my own kernels, killed TTYs all in the pursuit of a few extra kb of RAM saved. Can I tinker with Linux? Yes. Do I want to? No. My hobby interests are elsewhere and these days I want something that "Just Works (tm)".
Right now I'm stuck on KUbuntu, even after a year of distro hopping, because I keep running face first into small issues that I consider solved. Arch & Manjaro got the boot because both decided it is A-OK to ship Samba without a configuration. Not even the base config shipped with Samba renamed to force people to configure it on their own. I just want to share a folder via SMB for my tablet to access. Ubuntu (and Debian it looks like) does it with minimal issue and not telling the user to hit up the Samba Git repo to download a file that should already be there!
But I want off Ubuntu. I'm tired of ripping things Canonical is dead set on shoving my way (Snaps, yes, I'm talking snaps). I'd go back to Debian but I am not sure if Debian is up to the "Just Works (tm)" standard. Fedora wasn't the last time I tried it. If Nobara does that, even an crusty old Linux fart like me could come to like it.
Went with Nobara for my gaming rig instead of Fedora and then tweaking it from there since I didn't have the time/patience to figure that out as I needed to get it back up and running quickly. So far, Nobara has been great, which was a concern initially as Nobara ran like cap back on version 35 on my laptop but 37 runs great
Seems to me like Nobara's goal is to provide a painless experience for beginners, which it does pretty well. Sure, we can manually do all the tweaks that Nobara does with ease, but for a Linux newbie it could be much more intimidating.
I switched to Nobara just a few days ago so this was a surprise. I switched from Pop!_OS and oh my lord is it so much better. Nvidia drivers would break every reboot and some games just refused to run, and Gnome 43 is nice to have, and the tweaks make life sooo much easier.
What problems did you have with nvidia drivers on PopOS?
@@deusexaethera Every time I'd reboot, sometimes it wouldn't detect the gpu, and sometimes the driver would just fail to work, and I'd have to purge, reboot, install, reboot, and never shut it down again. And I couldn't use hybrid mode because then it would, again, fail to work, so I was stuck on dedicated mode and that is terrible for battery life.
I've been running Pop_OS for 1 year now , but haven't had any issues like breakage, I recently tried nobara os, yeah it is good. And came back to Pop OS. Have you downloaded the specific nvidia version ?
@@sumirandahal76 I don't know what you mean by the "specific" nvidia version, but I used the 525 drivers. I recognise this is not an issue everyone has, but it persisted for me throughout multiple reinstalls, and never really found a solution for.
@@aurelia_the_jelly i mean the nvidia iso image
Two very important metrics are missing from your benchmark: 1% lows and 0.1% lows (in other words, how much does it stutter). I think mangohud can log the frametimes, so that you can use them to calculate these metrics yourself, even if the benchmarks themselfes don't support them.
I would use nobara mostly to simplify the setup process a bit. One thing I hate on arch is setting drivers and lib32 up for gaming...
I was just about to say this too.
Given, except for Arch any other distros have issues with inconsistent frametime, (despite having just as good or even better Max/Avg FPS compared to Windows).
This completely nullifies any gains and features for me as having a stable frametime is crucial for a good gaming experience as your timing and everything else depends on it. Especially in competitive games. Not much of a point of being able to run 200+ fps if your frametime is all over the place, whether it spikes every now and then or is constantly fluctuating (enough) to make it stuttery-ish.
Some will probably say something nonsensical as "you're being pretentious", but given in some games few pixels can be the difference between a hit or miss, ergo a win or a loss in some cases, and having (a significant) frametime spike can very easily throw your aim way off than a couple of pixels. Not to mention the position (and motion) of enemies can also be affected. Considering the motion consistency of some of the newest gen monitors, this will become ever more key factor.
I changed Fedora by Nobara just because it was a hell trying to get mp4 codecs working between repos, also reddit has a lot of comments of the same issues with video playing on Fedora, also had the dependencies added saves a lot of time trying to figure the versions to install a common issue with nvidia drivers on Linux
The one thing that I really like about nobara is how they focus the updates around gaming. You will get things like up to date graphics drivers, although it is still on gnome 43 because vrr isnt working yet on 44. I dont have to worry about that breaking in gnome from an update which I appreciate.
Switched to Nobara os nearly half a year back as my first Linux distro and it's been very smooth so far. There hasn't been a game I want to play yet that's playable on Windows but not on this.
I've also honestly encountered less bugs in this timespan than I did on Windows 🤔
yeah..... windows is just a buggy mess now.
Roblox. Basically most of the big titles are blocked by stupid shit like copy protection
@@emeukal7683 With the Steam Deck becoming a massive success, Roblox, Destiny 2, and Valorant are going to lose users. I mean, Destiny 2 is already on that path, but just watch.
@Zeft Gaming Windows 10 was usable. Not amazing, but usable. When I tried Windows 11 for the first time since I switched over to Linux full-time in late 2020, it blew my mind on how bad Windows 11 was. Like, it looks like a bad clone of KDE Plasma and Cinnamon put together, and even that's an understatement!
I think you're missing the point, and a few times. "But you can do that yourself, five minutes more" "same thing as you could do with X app" "just three wfhjek to install and a fgeuyfg to apply, nothing too complex" the point is you know all this, and a basic novice doesn't. Unknown unknowns. "There''s an X app? This can be done??". Some "Yeah, Linus, you could just do that in command line, you dummy" vibes. That's the point of this batteries-included approach. The execution needs more work, but it's the right idea.
True, I should have focused more on the advantages for a newcomer to Linux
@@TheLinuxEXPxactly, you should delete this video and remake it with that focus in mind. Glorious egg roll recognized set all the time he was wasting making fedora actually usable wasn't worth it, not even for him, and he literally works at Red Hat. That should tell you how insufferable that "5 to 10 minutes of downloads" is. He gave Fedora the Ubuntu treatment and created an actually usable system on a fresh install. You do great work, but you really dropped the ball here.
Deleting is a bit much, but yes more of the new user experience would have been neat to get into.
For me the default ui on nobara, as well as the layout switcher is just perfect for newcomers.
And yes, you could patch in vrr, patch your kernel with openrgb support, patch gnome, apply fixes, but new users won't know how to, or frankly they shouldn't need to if they want windows feature parity.
I've been running nobara for about half a year, switched to arch on my desktop because why not, but the out of the box experience of nobara is so great I'm still running it on my laptop.
@@TheLinuxEXPYeah! You should as more people like me, who were avid Windows users, are coming to Linux without having any in depth idea, relying on vast community support which includes TH-cam channels like yours. I am not saying that you should not make videos taking expert users in mind but those should be mentioned either in the title or in the description or at the starting of the video and those should be in depth tutorials, not 'Which is best for you' type. But, on the other hand, your videos are good.
@skywalkdesign2023 Funny enough I've been running fedora with plasma 6 since it came out.
As a newer Linux user - I became so frustrated with Fedora that I was ready to delete it and never look back - when I stumbled across Nobara. It still wasn't easy, but it was light years ahead of trying to figure out all the command line nonsense to get Steam / Lutris / Wine up and running. Thanks for reviewing this.
Really nice video. Nobara is a cool project and Fedora is one of my favorite distros. I tried Nobara and it seemed solid but I'm a hobbyist so I like setting things up myself.
Nobara sounds the best for new Linux users, who just decided to move from Mac/Windows and wants at least the start to be smooth and see some results asap, instead of tinkering for a few days. I dunno how it compares to Ubuntu in beginner-friendliness, but based on this channel at least, Ubuntu is not in a good shape right now.
IMO Ubuntu is good at seeming beginner friendly at first, but troubleshooting problems pile up in waves. With derivatives its no different, although Pop! OS is perhaps the least obtrusive among them.
@@savagej4y241 Yea, i could not even try Ubuntu because on my test rig it refused to even install. (tried another Ubuntu-based os which also failed so i suspect the problem is with the Ubuntu base itself)
@@StarfoxHUN Ubuntu and derivatives just refuse to cooperate with some drivers. In my case it was the Realtek microphone related drivers. Tried for weeks to resolve it and eventually gave up on Pop! OS. But other than that Pop! is nice.
I have nobara on my desktop and fedora on my laptop, and I agree that the advantages aren't anything crazy, but it is convenient to have media codecs and other niceties out of the box. Though for an experienced user it's nothing that can't easily be replicated just using fedora.
Glorious Eggroll is an experienced user and he was so tired of fedora's BS that he made his own distro just because all that stuff and experience user can do easily was a giant pain in the butt for him, and a waste of time. Time is valuable, something Linux users don't understand because for them, a computer isn't a tool, it's a toy. The minute Lennox users understand this, the minute Linux can actually be a decent operating system for end users. Without Valve and their Steam Deck, Linux would be held back.
@@MrGamelover23 I agree. Valve is the big company pushing Linux forward. Maybe they are tired of Microsoft's 💩.
@@cameronbosch1213it carried the entire "Linux gaming" agenda.
@@cameronbosch1213 That's exactly why they were pushing Linux so hard. Remember when Windows 8 introduced the Microsoft store? Valve realized that if Microsoft did something like make it impossible to publish window software outside of the store, their entire business model is dead. So, in order to give themselves an out in case Windows made selling steam games impossible, they spent a decade pushing Linux. And thank God they did, because even if you don't like Linux, you have to admit that PC gaming being entirely dependent on one operating system isn't good for anybody except Microsoft.
@@MrGamelover23 I agree. That's why I hope Valve does release a Steam Deck 2 with an updated APU soon, because I want competition without having to go back to Windows!
(I know they said they wouldn't for a few more years, but the ROG Ally really should make Valve reconsider.)
I switched from Manjaro to Nobara some months ago. I wanted a functional Wayland w/Nvidia, dual monitors and good Steam experience, also good and stable developer workstation. Nobara has been working pretty well for me so far.
My primary reason for nobara: nautilus comes with type-ahead search (the usual fix to get it is a ppa, thus only applicable on ubuntu etc, not on fedora)
Honestly this seems excellent! Fedora without nearly as much setup just to get to square 1, and 1-click layout customization ala Zorin OS and Manjaro GNOME are big selling points to me. And if those don't work, vanilla GNOME and KDE options? I'm gonna try this soon.
Thanks for the info!
Fedora is a great and stable release. I did try Nobara out of curiosity on my gaming computer and it was working fine out of the box. Steam worked and I was playing my games in no time.
Then, came the software center notifications about the Nvidia driver updates. I decided since experience was good up to this point, why not update this way (I was coming from Arch and was used to updating via the terminal).
Well, big mistake. The application got stuck in a neverending loop of downloading the appropriate drivers, installing, getting an error, rolling back and starting over again.
The most annoying part is that the pop up to update was not going away. It overlapped everything and didn't go away. Even after using dnf in terminal. I'm back on Arch, lol.
I hoped you would elaborate on the package manager and repos subject. To my limited understanding, Nobara uses regular Fedora repositories, but also their own at the same time. That said it's recommended to actually use it over other things, including simple `sudo dnf update -y` in terminal, as this might lead to problems or even brick the OS, like I did after some months on my test VM by running just that command. I might be also wrong, as I didn't do any extended testing or research.
I do agree that even though Nobara might be more convenient at first, and generally better due to patched kernel and whatnot, it may also suffer from delayed updates or stability, for example just because something updated the wrong way and desynced. Would love to hear from long time users though.
I'm pretty excited about this one. I've got an SSD coming in that I plan on setting up to dual boot linux next to my windows PC and this distro checks all the boxes I've been browsing around for.
Ubuntu < Debian,
Manjaro < Arch,
Nobara < Fedora
Facts
I've been stuck with nobara for a half year already and is the only distro I've seen yet that respects my sudden change in graphics choice on my laptop without having to get stuck on just my dedicated nvidia gpu.
you forgot to mention the steam app isn't a flatpak, it's a repo maintained by nobara, also a lot of gaming-specific apps have nobara repo versions instead of flatpaks.
I wonder if it would be the same story on a system with AMD chips, because I thought some of the optimizations were targeting AMD CPUs.
It is easy to fix the "eleven" layout where menu is in the wrong location:
Go to extension manager, open dash to panel settings, move "center box" to the top.
From my understanding is that the developer want a Linux distro for his dad that would be easy to use and look similar to windows. Which is probably why some things are duplicated like the package manager. To be honest I would rather just have one place where I can download and install programs. That's why I first started to use the terminal and now I am trying out the nix package manager.
The one thing I wish this had is secure boot like Fedora. I wonder if it's also optimized for touchscreens when using the KDE desktop. I might give this a try and my surface go and see how it works.
The way I see it Nobara is kinda like Pop_Os where it's just a remake/spin on Ubuntu/Debian but with some tweaks to make it a bit more user friendly, but it's using Fedora as it's base.
After the Solus incident, I'm a lot less inclined to jump on a one-man distro. Upstream could learn from these optimisations though!
Which Solus incident? I just heard it's basically dead.
@@solarwind97 Joshua Strobl (former Solus co-lead) resigned in Jan 2022 to work on updating Budgie. That's essentially why Solus died. If one person leaving the project to pursue other projects means the viability of a distro fork goes with them, then its a highly vulnerable fork.
@@solarwind97 That being said, what Nobara offers out of the box is so good from a Windows refugee standpoint that its worth supporting just so that hopefully by the time Nobara eventually goes like Solus did, Fedora will have improved new user experience enough to switch.
I stopped my distro hopping on Nobara. Everything about it I absolutely love!
I’m with you on this, I don’t understand the heavy customizations of the look and feel on gnome. The only set of change that I appreciate tho is the Nautilus ones. Start typing and you have search. Toggling between breadcrumb and text in the navigation bar is great because on vanilla gnome it’s a pita (Ctrl+L)
they also mentioned fixing the drag+drop issues but I didn’t have the chance to test it
The main thing I have against Nobara (and why I went with Fedora) is because GE takes too long to roll out updates. Fedora 38 came out in April, but Nobara didn't move to F38 until the end of August. At the end of the day I can configure Fedora for gaming in under an hour, having to wait months for updates is a dealbreaker for me.
I love Nobara but my main concern is it's one dude maintaining it. Once unfortunate life event would impact it.
It would be good in a such unfortunate event to make a video showing every step how you can exactly reproduce Nobara with a clean Fedora install.
Im a gamer first and a linux enthusiast second. Theres nothing worse than wanting to try out a game with your friends and having to say "I cant get this game to run" when everone is waiting on you to play. With nobara, these moments are few and far between compared to previous distros I have tried. I have been daily driving Nobara for about a year and I can say that 80% of my steam library works and runs well. Basically I can trust that any Silver or higher rated game on ProtonDB will usually work with minimal troubleshooting. Still, im looking forward to the day it is 100% so i can drop my dual both with windows. But until then, ill be sticking with Nobara.
Splendid! I was just looking for some info about Nobara for past two days and you release a video about this topic.
As someone who is curious about finally making the switch to Linux on my main gaming PC and setting my PC up on the TV more often, I can't wait for your htpc build video.
I am a big fan of Fedora, but I had to recently switch to Nobara because Flatpak OBS wasn't able to capture my screen anymore ! It was working fine on Ubuntu and Fedora 37, so I assume it's a problem with Fedora 38 and some Nvidia driver. And as I use my computer for doing music composition livestreams many times per week, this was a big no-no for me ! After many failed attempts and complete reinstall, Nobara worked out of the box in my use case, so I will stick with Nobara as long as the problem persists with Fedora. I'm not a fan of all the additional stuff and programs, as I prefer to install them myself and use the terminal, but on the display side, it is fluid as hell on my setup.
So a good distro, that is more than just Fedora with some tweaks ! It is Fedora with less restrictive principles, which is good for today's content creators.
P.S. : content de voir qu'une des grosses chaînes françaises sur Linux est tenue par un compatriote :) J'aime beaucoup ton travail, et ça m'inspire à me battre pour utiliser exclusivement Linux pour produire mes morceaux, malgré les désavantages qui persistent !
I'm on Nobara for a half of a year as my first distro now, outdated GPUs runs pretty well after manual installation of its drivers (390xx for my current GTS 450 for example). Not so smooth as with bleeding edge cards but pretty well for a newcomer like me. I even play games here.
@@turanamo nobara allows you to install 515 and later through its automatic app, for outdated drivers I found fedora guides and installed them under nouveau
The problem is instead of having your vendor be a huge community that has existed for two decades, you're instead giving that responsibility to a much smaller one that has only recently started. There is much more to a GNU/Linux distro than just benchmark performances. And going by their already fairly small track record, it doesn't seem very trust worthy to have it as an operating system on a computer (mashup of SELinux and AppArmor, kernels are not signed, lack of good QA like making a release and immediately releasing subsequent hotfix releases because everything went wrong, etc)
Hi! You're one of my favourite linux youtubers.
I'm torn between Arch distros and Nobara. I ran both and I love both.
I benchmarked Endeavour os and Nobara today with Shadow of the Tomb Raider, that I ran on Heroic games launcher using Proton experimental with Esync, Fsync, and Gamemode on. My box is 5800X3D with 16 gigs of memory running @3200 the vidcard is an msi 6750 gaming X Trio and Nobara won by 11%!
Go Nobara!
Whatever Nobara adds on top of Fedora can be added to a fedora install within 5-10 mins EACH!
U can disable what u don't need on Nobara fairly easily but to get the extra features on Fedora it does take little time BUT
u need to keep in mind the cumulative time taken to get all your required enhancements AND the time taken to get to know how to make those changes in Fedora.
I love Fedora's clean experience and constant updates but making all sorts of changes to have a better experience with it is a hassle.
Simply saying Nobara has this but Fedora can also just by spending 5 mins is NOT fair imo.
I think all linux reviews should also add "Battery Performance" as a topic of discussion.
True, I should have looked into that as well!
My biggest selling point for nobara was the driver support. Fedora didn't know the touchpad of my laptop, so I couldn't right-click on it. On nobara it works just fine
I feel like this video missed the point. It's not about more FPS, but providing everything you need at install without the need for tweaking.
I use nobara on my gaming pc and fedora on my thinkpad. Nobara is perfect for gaming out of the box. It genuinely take less time to start gaming on nobara than it does on a fresh windows install for me.
13:00 "so you never have to figure them out for yourself" . . . Yeah totally, figuring this stuff out for a lot of people can take hours. - even searching and experimenting with those extensions.
right now im using nobara 38 (switching from pop os) and so far the experience is great, games are working after doing few changes and the only gripe that i found (probably because of my nvidia card) is some strange artifacts stutters but after switching from wayland into x11 the experience is wonderful, im temping to remove my windows installation but I will try for a month first
thx for all your videos
Running the KDE version and on X11 it's fantastic, Wayland is still to buggy for my 3070 atm.
I've been pretty happy with it so far and even got to upgrade the fedora base before Nobara 38 was released, It did cause some weird stuff, but nothing that made it unusable.
The ease of use in terms of gaming and the quality that GE delivers is fenomenal, as he has said many times, it's a hobby distro... And that's how it should be treated as well.
It's for making your gaming easier, not exceptionally faster. Glad you covered this :)
I have a 3070 and I am running Nobara on Wayland. The only real consistent buggyness that I am experiencing is some Electron apps flickering, or some context menus being black half the time. But other than that, it is a pretty smooth experience.
Nice to see my Yum Extender Next Gen get some screen time, was not aware that it was picked up by Nodora
I think you are missing the point on the startup app.
At 5:12 you said that the post-installation app saves 5-10 minutes and that's it. It can be true for you - experienced user, who already know how to "properly" install say NVIDIA drivers, Steam or DaVinci Resolve. However, inexperienced users or even those who simply never installed these specific things before, might waste way more time and run into issues - every now and then I see people asking how to install Steam, because whatever they did ended up in error. Maybe Linus wouldn't uninstall GNOME if he tried Nobara.
Likewise, simple customization options like layout selector is something that people may be interested in after installing a system. I would argue that most people who switch from Windows to Linux with gaming as one of major concerns - they'll still want some form of "taskbar". I know this kinda goes against how GNOME developers intend the DE to be used, but at the same time I get the impression that "dash" related extensions are one of most popular ones.
The point is: I think it's actually useful first start app that most people might be interested in, unlike GNOME's default one which in my opinion is next to useless. Though I agree that Nobara's app could be developed better - feels clunky, sometimes freezes or even crashes, at least as far I tested it.
I am one of those who requested Nobara review, but I thought you'll not only approach it as experienced Fedora user, but also from newcomer perspective and what Desktop Environments or distros can learn from it.
I used Nobara for quite a while but I switched back to Arch (btw) because Nobara is a one-man show and nobody knows how long GE can maintain such a distro. For example Firefox always lacks behind the Fedora Package because of some non-free codecs that nobara ships with Firefox, to me a browser is crucial and I do not wanna rely on a single guy maintaining these things. For gaming with a AMD gpu Nobara is great out of the box. I was a little bit scared if I can handle all the gaming stuff on Arch but it was easy with the AUR and some reading. I use the zen kernel, still AMD gpu, so no driver f*ckup, mangohud git from AUR, protonup-qt for custom proton by GE and this works like a charm with no issues at all. One really good advantage in Nobara is, that it ships default GNOME with VRR patches to use AMDs FreeSync. As these patches are outdated in the AUR atm I needed to make a decision to stay at GNOME 43, update to GNOME 44 without VRR or use KDE which handles VRR very well by default - I switched to KDE with little to no issues with Wayland btw. I like the Fedora Eco System but I think gaming machines should always be up2date which includes the drivers and these are part of the kernel, which distro ships kernel updates faster than Arch? ... But don't get me wrong, Nobara has it's points, I liked it but I like freedom of chosing things I want to use and what not, for example I really dont care about Blender or OBS studio, why ship it by default? It's bloat for most of the ppl, anyways it's hard to satisfy all the ppl with a distro, GE's doing a great job and helps pushing Linux gaming even to people who otherwise would stick on shitty window$
Hello Nick,
Well, I guess Nobara's gains about gaming being not really significant comparing to Fedora could be explained because the current version is based on Fedora 37 ?
Maybe you could to some benchmarking for Fedora 37 against Nobara 37 or for Nobara 38 against Fedora 38 when the former will be available ?
Best
I started using Fedora when I switched to Linux, and literally couldn't use my PC for two weeks because of Nvidia driver issues (tutorials didn't help) and other problems. I then switched to Nobara, and it was amazing! I didn't have to enable any repos or codecs - everything was just ready to use. To this day, I still use Nobara, and I absolutely love it.
There are actually a couple of weird bugs that I've encountered, which seem to be unique to my setup, but since the team is pretty small, I'm willing to overlook them. Honestly, I can live with a couple of non-critical bugs in order to use Nobara.
I'm currently using it on my PC. As far as I can tell, you could just treat it as a Fedora that is more ready ootb for gaming and content creation, or just general use as you don't need to mess around with rpm-fusion and whatever, with a weekly update schedule (barring hotfixes and distro upgrade).
They have come a long way, I started out with the early versions where they are pretty buggy, needed hotfixes all the time (one time even a reinstall back in the very early days), and it isn't particularly clear yet how it would shape up.
Now? I think I outright want this as an Immutable distro where I could just stick it in my work/personal laptop and forget about it. An achievement considering I'm an Arch refugee who went to Ubuntu LTS after all the Arch kerfuffle last year.
Although, there IS an Ubuntu version of Nobara called PikaOS that is quite interesting as well. The project seems to be on friendly terms with Nobara given it has a channel on GE's Discord server. But I hope uBlue makes an image based on Nobara because I really, really want it.
A year after this video and I'm here watching this video while running Nobara. Here are my thoughts:
It's a perfect distribution for my personal needs, as someone who's main computer use is gaming, programming and artwork. I'm using the KDE edition of the distro, and have configured it to my heart's content. I've been playing all sorts of games, whether they be on Steam, Lutris or having their own wine config. I've also been developing my own games with Godot and Bevy, drawing things with Krita and generally making daily use of this distribution.
I've been looking for the right distribution for a few years, repeatedly installing a distribution, trying it, falling short and returning to windows in defeat. Having done lots of testing over time, I can confirm however that Nobara is stable enough for my needs, and I'm making the full switch to it over the next few days
I've been running Nobara and fedora on two separate laptops for about 6 months. They've both been generally reliable, however after the last update I'd say something in Fedora changed for the worse and its corrupting partitions and having to use scan disk to fix them up for some reason (mainly NTFS formatted partitions). Even rolling back a couple of updates doesn't seem to fix it. Its affected Nobara as well (where I first noticed it).
Previous to that, I've been finding Nobara a lot more stable than when it first came out. The battery life on it is superb compared to other distros - I can put the laptop to sleep and it will sit there for about 2 weeks before running out of power (instead of 2hrs LOL).
NVidia drivers installed without issue and lots of useful apps included by default. The package manager is a little weird to use, but once you get used to it, it works well enough. Nobara also fixed (or hid) a lot of the error messages I was getting with Fedora on this laptop. The error messages were nonsensical in that they told you nothing of the error other than email the kernel maintainers (again with no info on how to do this).
One thing I would say with either is support. I haven't been able to find a support forum for Nobara. The forum for Fedora is unofficial and community driven. Its also a lot harder to get answers there than other distro forums that I've been to. So take that into consideration if you need more help than you can find with a Google search.
Please remember - your comments about how long things will take to replicate, are based upon your vast experience and expertise in Linux in general. Not everyone is able to learn and remember things as well as you do. Nobara takes that headache away. Thank you for your content - always enjoyable and informative.
i tried nobara on a whim one time about a year ago. fired up overwatch which is one of like three games i play nowadays and i got an absurd framerate out of it. it was something like 350fps when the usual framerate for every other distro was something like 200. suffice to say i was sold.
unfortunately i'm not getting that now on OW2 but i'm just using the wine version lutrus gave me so there's probably room for improvement.
pro tip for everybody using nobara, use the "update & sync" app. don't just "dnf update". nobara is more or less rolling unlike fedora and dnf alone doesn't always handle repo changes and stuff properly. never use the DE software centres either for system updates for the same reasons.
Yeah, I did dnf update on my few months old Nobara VM, and that was the end of it 😹
Any idea how the performance compares to Windows?
@@SirRFI very generally speaking linux vs windows for gaming goes like this. on linux, windows games are run through a comparability layer. that loses some performance. however, on low end machines, linux can still come out with better performance because of the lower overhead of the OS. and it still varies from game to game.
if literally all one cares about is playing vidyuh then it's best to just use windows on a standard PC.
Nobara looks interesting to me. I use Windows but have some experience with Linux Servers. My goal is to switch to Linux until Win 10 EOL. I've installed Arch for that purpose because I liked the idea of a rolling distro and the AUR. That said, I'm considering switching to Nobara - after reading that they've added patches and tweaks to make gaming work better, I thought that might be a good idea, because I can't be bothered to look up and apply the patches manually. I'm sure I have enough Linux experience to get it done but I just want to use my daily driver PC, not tinker with it like it's a hobby project.
Somewhat similar perspective, except my goal is switching to Linux BY Win10 EOL. Win11 is problematic in so many ways that its a total no-go. I'd expect most browsers to support Win10 past 2025 like they did for Win7 three years past the official EOL date, but even then that's 5 years left to ditch Windows forever.
@@savagej4y241 That's what I was trying to say - I want to make the switch happen before win 10 loses support. I don't want to use Win 11.
Watching this video from my freshly installed Nobara on desktop. The only real issue I'm having is that my drives other than the boot drive don't seem to be automatically mounting on startup, regardless of being set to do so on Disks. But I'm pretty sure there's something I'm missing.
Beyond all that, I tought I was going to need more time to transfer my workflow from Windows, figuring out what is available and what has better options, but it's been a week and the only thing I haven't really resolved yet is transfering the mess of notes I have on Notion to Obsidian and it has nothing to do with Nobara. In the end, getting used to this environment I already feel more at home than with any OS I used before.
Yeah, I think it’s a good experience for recent Windows newcomers
I agree.. For an experienced user Nobara is nice to have with a few percent on top of Fedora.. nothing groundbreaking.. just like this video
Personally, being a professional 3D animator and wanting to use Maya and Blender with Optix/Cuda, and do some editing on Resolve, and casual gamin on my favorite games which many are AAA games and/or online. All that on a stable system that doesn't require tinkering to make it work, even though I'm not against it sometimes for fun when I want to.
In these regards, Nobara sounds like an ideal distro.
I know the experienced Linuxians might disagree with the idea, but having a distro that does a lot of the job for you is quite a big deal. I know I can install drivers myself, or customize things easily in 10-15 min. But that's only as fast and simple when I am familiar with what I can do and how, which isn't a given to everyone, and at the end of the day: if there's a distro that can get me to the same point with less demand from me, I'm all for it and I bet I'm not the only one.
I've tried a few distros in the past, mainly Debian based but also vanilla Fedora and Manjaro, and I ended up quitting all of them because I ended up spending too much time just trying to set up and understand my system instead of just using it for what I needed. I especially had troubles getting Cuda/Optix accelerations to function in my 3D apps, and all the help I could get about it was to distro-jump to some arch distro or chug down pages of manuals, which is exactly what I don't want. I need a system for doing my job and leisure on, not for getting a challenge. The only smooth Linux experience I got so far was using old Centos distros at work, but that's precisely because it's managed by the company and not by me, everything is ready and functionnal and I'm left with the pleasure of just using the system and tinkering for extras only when I want to instead of being forced to do it.
FEDORA is great, but NOBARA makes novices prefer Linux. Hope more people like Linux.🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰
i was drawn to this video because i was frustrated with my previous build of arch-based garuda. i was brought up on arch, and tried to stick with the rolling release community driven model, but more than once, garuda in particular caused a system crash that required loss of power to reset and corrupted various components of my dedicated /home partition. i wiped my entire drive and moved from garuda to nobara, reasoning that i just wanted something that was stable and had graphical options for package management, that way i didn't have to re-learn niche terminal commands and could get up and running quickly. this was about 3 days ago, so i can't speak for long-term stability, but it really provides a polished and user-friendly experience out of the box. i could give this to my tech-illiterate mom and she could figure it out
Being Linux noob, I think Nobara does a great job not by saving time, but offering an easy way to install gaming soft without need of searching the Internet.
Nobara has everything I use right out of the box
Gaming
Editing
Fedora
Multimedia
🏆 ✌️
How do you get those lines across the window tilebars?
This vid's a year old, but just throwing this out there. As someone who just began using Linux just two days ago I can't stress enough that it is absolutely NOT "just 5 or 10 minutes". It's at least 30 minutes. Your pre-existing knowledge and experience is pulling major weight. 👍
I got so excited when I saw the title of this video!! I've been using Nobara on my laptop for a couple months now and I enjoy it. I was considering moving to Fedora; I have Nobara set up to look like vanilla Gnome anyway, and I have stability concerns since it's a hobby distro. But, I'm happy to see there is actually a performance difference in gaming, and I agree that having a guarentee that the distro will be made so gaming "just works" is great. My laptop is older, so I'll take any boost in gaming performance I can get. Also, that was a good point about using Xorg on Nobara, because I was getting really strange performance issues in games on Wayland. Nobara should probably default to Xorg until those issues on Wayland are ironed out. Could just be my hardware though, it has an Nvidia GPU.
I'm surprised to hear you managed to get the Xbox Series controller working, I never managed to get it to connect via Bluetooth on Linux ever since I bought it :D I have XpadNeo installed, am on Nobara now.
Why aren't some of these additions are upstreamed to the kernel?
Great video as aways sir. Maybe as a follow up you could go down the gaming rabbithole a little more and compare Nobara to Regata OS at some point.
Maybe, yeah!
Regata is pretty cool. I would enjoy seeing a video about it.
I've long wondered this, and to see the data pretty clearly make a 5%-ish difference is so interesting. Thank you for posting this!!!
I'm an experienced linux user of many years. After finally making the full switch for desktop (MS is getting too scummy to justify, what were they thinking with Recall?!), I distro hopped a bunch trying to find a convenient gaming experience. I want to do things with my PC, not to it. Nobara ended that distro hopping. Every game I try works ootb, no fussing. I think that's the real experience Nobara is going for, regardless of FPS, intial setup time saves, or any other metric. It's nice to see "it just works" being prioritized in the linux space.
As much as I love Linux, sometimes it's nice to new-boot into a distro and not have to do a bunch of arcane hunting and adjusting. I've been wanting to move my Nitro 5 from Win 11 since I bought it last year, but I've hesitated because I didn't want to lose out on gaming time because of having to figure things out for days, or at worst, go back to Win 11. I've looked at Garuda, but I feel better now about Nobara. Thanks for this video. And yes, from what I've seen, the new Nobara release addresses those DaVinci Resolve issues you mentioned.
I use nobara cause I'm a Linux noob, and all the little things you mention that it does to save you 5 minutes, saves someone who doesn't know what they're doing a lot more time, and effort, and possibly breaking their distro in some way they don't understand how to fix. If you know what you're doing with Linux, then yeah, Nobara probably isn't a big deal.
Absolutely! For a beginner, it’s way easier to have all that stuff there!
It's also important to add that Glorious Eggroll is a current (or former?) RedHat employee so he most likely have better understanding on the Fedora internals and definitely know what he is doing.
Theres been no other linux distro that I love using consistently. Nobara works straight of the box, but it also works as my software development platform, it just works for me!!
9:42 the "nice" gets me everytime
I like the mint design a bit better..us it possible to change the nobara to look like mint?
I'm using Nobara for the last few weeks and it's awesome. It work in my hybrid laptop (i7+RTX) almost out of the box. Just install the drivers and you are good to go. It looks pretty cool too.
I can't install anything even with bottles and terminal
@@aymansyrisk what you mean? Is there any error?
@@SteveRayMorse yes error in terminal and installing
@@aymansyrisk Whats the error?
@@SteveRayMorse i just try to install windows 10 , in terminal, the command is error even my usb is not working to reinstall my pc
Seems like a good option for people who game on windows and want to give gaming on Linux a try
GREAT review/comparison video!
My experience between Fedora/Nobara was very similar to yours, except that I had some really frustrating issues on Nobara making Dark Mode unusable for LibreOffice and a few others. I switched back to Fedora and much prefer it to Nobara as I just have far less issues in Fedora (which just works purrfectly). I expect that eventually Nobara will fix many of the issues I had with it and then I will probably switch to it.
its great for ppl who wants a complete multimedia distro ootb, i applied some tweaks from nobara myself. Not a lot of stuff in their repo unfortunately, guaranteed to have missing dep, but atleast GE respond fast to any gaming needs, just gaming tho
I had Fedora 36/37 on an Asus Optimus laptop, and it was a nightmare. Optimus was constantly causing problems, with games sometimes only running on the internal GPU, or only running on the external GPU if and only if I played on an external monitor. Installed PopOS, and 90% of my problems were gone. Nobara's easy DaVinci install is appealing, but I know older versions of DaVinci had lousy codec support due to licensing restrictions.
I have one little question/complaint. Why didn't you use the GE Proton on Nobara when comparing to what you get OOB with Fedora? That's part of the reason the OS exists.
Because it’s not the default, so a lot of the target audience wouldn’t think of using it, I think
I guess you can get it on both anyway, so it would be less "apples to apples" comparison
@@SirRFI Fair point, but I was thinking in realms of out of the box experience.
@@TheLinuxEXP just do a part2 follow up video :)
This is what I'm using now (because I got sick of waiting on Zorin to update). It works fantastically. I have had issues, but I have a suspicion they're all Wayland related and I would have seen the same problems in Fedora. Namely: Calibre viewer won't open (so I use a different epub viewer), when coming out of sleep mode the desktop seems to get confused about dash-to-dock and doesn't restore the windows perfectly (oh well, I just click to fix them), Chromium was miserably choppy (switched to Firefox), there was a weird problem with large text files not opening (eventually started working, maybe it was the reinstall of the package I did?) I do like the distro. I don't play AAA games because those suck and are money/timesyncs, but all the normal games I've tried work great.
You could switch to X11 in the login screen and see if the issues persist!
@@TheLinuxEXP indeed you should. I've been running fedora and Wayland was giving me a lot of problems that immediately just disappeared when switching to X11. At least on kde with nvidia Wayland doesn't seem quite bulletproof yet.
Thanks for your take on Nobara Nick. Appreciated!
How is the hybrid GPU setup on your laptop? I've had trouble with my 4600H/1650Ti laptop, such as being unable to share displays over HDMI without custom drivers, difficulty setting fan speeds, and installing displayLink drivers (to shared display over USB 3) absolutely ruined my performance even after uninstalling the drivers :( I've heard AMD-nVidia graphics aren't as graceful with hybrid graphics but I really don't want to give money to Intel, especially when the laptop I have is already perfectly fine for what I need it for.
A lot of this was xorg apparently but sadly Pop doesn't offer Wayland yet, so maybe Fedora/Nobara would fix!
Nobara has preinstalled an fsync capable kernel and some fixes, which are necessary to run Star Citizen. This was one of the reasons I chose the OS.
I wonder if, because one of the things that gets patched and updated faster is the mesa drivers, if the benchmark results would have more of a gap on AMD / Intel.
Maybe, yeah!
I don't agree with any of you who says that Nobara is only for gaming. Indeed makes the gaming experience more affordable, but it became my daily driver since last year (Nobara 36) and never looked back. No more distro hopping... I lied i hopped from Nobara Official to Nobara KDE 😂
what's the notepad app you're using at 11:41? Looks great