I think I’ll finally bite the bullet and migrate from Fedora 39 to Nobara. Wish me luck!
Do tell about your experience afterwards. I’m considering it, myself.
Well here I am running Nobara 39. What can I say? Everything works just fine out of the box (benefits of full AMD system I guess). It’s hard to compare performance because my old system was very bloated, it started as Fedora 35 and been updating ever since, but overall I’ve been getting improvements of around 20+ fps on games. I feel the biggest improvement is moving away from Gnome X11 to KDE + Wayland. In Gnome I had to use X11 because half the stuff wouldnt work properly otherwise, while now with Wayland haven’t had a single issue.
TLDR; If you game on Linux and you have some free time, can’t go wrong with Nobara.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Nobara 39 was released today as this modified Fedora Linux downstream that focuses on adding user-friendly fixes and various gamer/enthusiast type desktop optimizations.
The Nobara Project continues to be led by GloriousEggroll of Proton-GE fame for working to advance this modified Fedora build.
Nobara 39 is based on upstream Fedora Workstation 39 that debuted last month while notable in this Nobara release is deciding to shift from the GNOME Shell to KDE Plasma desktop by default.
The GNOME version of Nobara 39 continues to carry some patches around Variable Rate Refresh (VRR), enhancements to the Nautilus file manager, and more.
Nobara 39 also adds in some patches around Steam Deck OLED support, setting amdgpu.ppfeaturemask=0xffffffff by default to allow use with apps like CoreCtrl, patching GLFW for native Wayland support, and updating to the DNF5 package manager, among other alterations to the Fedora 39 base.
The official screenshot of Nobara 39 with its new KDE Plasma desktop default.
The original article contains 212 words, the summary contains 157 words. Saved 26%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I get a bit confused when I see projects like this.
Why would we need a whole new distro based on Fedora when all these tweaks could be done by adding a repo and setting the priority? I feel like I’m going to loose the security fixes from upstream, or they will be delayed way too long. I’d much rather a repo that had patched kernels, a Steam install that doesn’t need tweaking on an AMD laptop, and good Proton-GE support, this just seems like a waste of everyone’s time, including the developers.
But that’s just me! You do you! I just don’t get it.
(Also, I’d like to keep SELinux, it’s not that hard if you know how to use the proper tools and most issues are a one-line fix.)
I’m building a gaming PC for my Dad and am planning to install Nobara for him. For one he doesn’t know what a “repo” is much less a kernel or Proton-GE.
But for two, I use it myself because I’m lazy. I appreciate that someone takes the time to patch things to work optimally out of the box. Sure I could patch things myself, but I’m not in tune with the latest state of drivers and proton and workarounds for Linux gaming. I won’t notice if new patches are needed or old ones are no longer needed.
It’s nice that I can leave all that to GloriousEggroll.
I find it interesting that they don’t even include Heroic and that they use OnlyOffice instead of Libre
I’m most excited about the package manager update and new, faster repository mirrors. Updates in Nobara 38 are glacial compared to other distros I’ve tried, on the order of several minutes for routine system updates, with querying the repos for package details taking over a minute and a half on its own.
