Hello. I would like to switch to Linux, but I also want to play. I have seen that all the games I play can be played on Linux with no problem. But I'm not sure about the distro. I have seen that Nobara is a good option, but before taking the plunge, I would like to know what your experience has been with it.
Thank you
I haven't played with it. However, I can say it is based on Fedora which is a good distro and Glorious Egg roll himself, besides working at Red Hat, is the creator of the Glorious Egg Roll version of the Proton compatibility layer.
Edit: stupid button, hit before I was finished. Besides the GE proton version, he does a lot of other enhancements to make Nobara more gamer friendly so it should be a relatively good distro to use because he knows the system better than most average Linux users and so provides the enhancements out of the box for gamers that want to game.
If you know what you are doing, the enhancements can be added to Fedora easily. But if you just want to setup and play immediately, Nobara is the way to go.
I am running Nobara for the past month and I absolutely love it. Its out of the box experience is pretty great. But you would expect it from the Team behind the Glorious Eggrolls Proton Patches, right?
It has the Gnome Shell Desktop which may not be super user tweakable but it looks very concise and beautiful nontheless.
There is a KDE ISO for Nobara. Scroll down on the download page.
Official ISO is Gnome + extensions for GE’s personal workflow, Gnome is base Gnome, KDE is base KDE, Steam Deck Edition is, well, like SteamOS (boots into gamescope-session by default then switch to desktop to go KDE)
Nobara comes with a "desktop selector" which allows to make Gnome Shell look a bit more like Windows (10/11), Unity, Gnome 2, MacOS or default Gnome Shell. And if you like the package you have with Nobara, you can always install the KDE desktop alongside Gnome Shell. At the login screen you can then select which Desktop System you want to boot :)
I don't use the full distro but I do run the kernel in Garuda and it works like a charm. As others have said, the developer, GloriousEggroll, is super trustworthy as he develops the GE-Proton compatibility package. Plus you can never really go wrong with Fedora.
I use it on my laptop. I had some issues with Fedora 37 and the nvidia / hybrid graphics and i couldnt get some games to default to the dedicated gpu rather than the integrated one. It was probably fixable, but it was a fresh install anyways so i gave Nobaru a shot. Zero issues, works great.
I still use Fedora on my desktop. It has an AMD GPU, and ive never had issues with it. Going on three years now i think.
Most popular Linux distributions will work great for gaming, Nobara (based on Fedora) included. It’s a great option, and one I can recommend. A lot of the more tedious work, that should be done with Fedora, is done for you. What’s more debatable is whether you go for Gnome (more like Mac’s OSX) or KDE (more like Windows), but that’s personal preference, not relating to gaming. Make sure to try them both, before you move to something else (or back to Windows). They’re both great, but very different options.
On Linux you're not stuck on a single theme. On gnome there is a plethora of extensions allowing to move the task bar as you want. Display the apps on it or not... And plenty more customization.
Gnome has however limited a lot the theming of the desktop (window color, border...). And now it's a bit clunky to install themes other than the default ones.
KDE has more customizations and settings, so much that it could be overwhelming at first.
There are also some differences with the file manager. I prefer Nautilus from Gnome (you can still install it on kde, tho it won't have the same look as the other apps).
And the KDE disk manager may as well be trash in my hands. I can't even setup a mount at boot without getting errors. So I just install Gnome Disks as I find it pretty easy to use.
on Linux if you have multiple partitions, and you want to set a shortcut to a secondary partition, you need to mount the partition (activate it).
In Linux a partition is like a folder. It is mounted to a folder.
I use Nobara KDE for over a year and I really like how everything is ready for gaming/streaming. There are some minor issues from time to time(ex. problems with updates) but GloriousEggroll posts news on his discord and website docs what to do with that.
Here is a video comparing Nobara and Fedora.
Not sure if it would be very helpful, but it may show what Nobara is changing. https://youtu.be/5eKSQT5mV-c
Also 3 months ago, so maybe some elements have changed slightly.