I ended up with Nobara
As some of you already know I’ve been playing around on a small partition with Linux Mint. Learned basic troubleshooting and fixed some driver issues.
Now I’m very impressed with how it runs and decided to daily Linux and keep Windows for things Linux can’t do. Currently installing Windows on a new small SSD as we speak. (240Gb for the OS plus it’s gonna get a 500GB NTFS partition on my 2TB gaming drive)
This brings me to my question. Which Distro? I’ve narrowed it down to keep using Mint or Fedora KDE Plasma 41. Mint is something I’ve already screwed around with and there’s loads of guides online about it.
But Fedora seems like a better for for me. I’m not afraid of tinkering at all. But as long as I came game and daily it for browsing, emails etc. without too much issues, I’m good.
What’s the consensus? Setting it up tonight after my new W11 install is up and running.
Nobara is actually one I highly considered. But I keep reading that base Fedora is more stable.
Of that’s not true I love the features Nobara comes with.
It’s more stable. But as I understand, it doesn’t come with any proprietary drivers or blobs, so you’ve got to do an amount of tinkering and configuring to get it running for gaming. Especially if you’ve got Nvidia GPU.
Whereas with nobara or bazzite, those features are baked in already, by professionals.
You need them either way, so my question is, who do you trust more? Yourself? Or the developers behind the gaming oriented flavors of Fedora?
I went with Bluefin, based on silverblue, based on Fedora. It has all the gaming stuff I need, plus like bazzite, it’s immutable (ish), so while it’s harder to do some stuff the normal Linux way, it’s also significantly more stable, because nothing I do or install ever touches the core operating system files. I can’t break anything, and this makes me happy 😁
nobara has a seperate iso for nvidia cards.
Nice! All the more reason to go with a distro that’s already suited to your needs. Just my opinion, obviously 🤷♂️
I mean, base Fedora probably is more stable.
Playing games requires an lot of extra stuff, and the kernal is more bleeding edge in nobara to keep those GPU updates (if AMD) and performance tweaks fresh and useful.
but generally speaking from my experience, Nobara is no more or less stable than anything else, windows or linux. And any issue I did rarely had was typically resolved with a reboot, and generally from a game.
You guys might have talked me into Nobora actually.
I’ve not been someone who’s favored stability over new tech and performance on Windows, so why should I on Linux?
Also, like others have said, changing the Distro if I hate it isn’t exactly the end of the world anyways.
The main issue with nobara is that it’s handled by a single person. Almost everything you get on nobara you can get with a few commands on the terminal in fedora; and whatever patches they have under the hood will at best get a marginal performance boost and at worst cause major crashes and issues.
Nobara is a solid choice for people that don’t like to tweak their system too much because it comes with everything you need to play games from the get-go. If you’re more of a power user there’s very little reason to pick it over fedora or arch.
That’s the reason I was considering Fedora instead. But I just installed Nobara, so I’ll see how it goes.
I’m VERY curious about Arch, but I’ll stay on this distro for a little bit(I think)
Well Arch is great at what it does: getting you the latest packages of everything without needing to upgrade every 6 months or whatever; that does come at the cost of a bit less stability. There’s EndeavourOS if you’re uncomfortable installing from the console.
Stability is a trap. It sounds automatically appealing but is so much more trouble it’s worth for the benefits it provides, especially for a daily driver system intended for gaming, not a long-forgotten server running in a closet that’s been doing the exact same thing for 20 years. The gaming ecosystem is not stable, new games are released constantly, new clients are released constantly, new updates and DLC are released constantly, new drivers are released constantly. You have no choice but to keep up and if your OS is not keeping up because it’s “stable” you’re in for a world of pain.
If you try to use a stable OS for an unstable goal you’ll be fighting it all the time, ironically things will be broken far more often than any “unstable” equivalent, because you won’t be able to get the latest rapid updates you need when you need them. To get things to work you’ll have to force different updates into place one by one, piece by piece, then future updates will get broken because you’ll end up with two copies of things that are conflicting one of which got manually installed.
Stable distros absolutely have their place, there’s nothing wrong with them and they’re typically the most used and popular distros because they are ridiculously good at doing what they’re designed to do. But playing games on your desktop is not what they’re designed to do.
I disagree that stable distros aren’t good at general purpose gaming systems, they work fine unless you have very new hardware.
And sometimes the newer stuff csn bring more problems than a stable distro, depending on your hardware.
As an example, my system is an nvidia laptop with an external monitor. Unfortunately, the Nvidia driver is absolutely unusable under Wayland with this setup, which was a bummer for me, as I wanted to use Fedora with it, but starting with Fedora 41, X11 was completely phased out, so I couldn’t fall back to it.
I’m not a fan of openSUSE tumbleweed or Arch based distros, which do still support X11, which left me with the more Stable distros. Mint worked flawlessly with my setup, and I have no issue gaming.
Tl;dr there’s more nuance to stability vs bleeding edge, and both have their place.
That’s an excellent point.
I run a brand new GPU, I like to play both very old and brand new games. I sometimes overclock my hardware, I’ve been really into modding games in the past.
Stable isn’t really how my gaming ecosystem is on Windows either. Not to mention Windows, Nvidia, AMD etc have always had a element of instability to it. I’ve ran beta updates on my PC for years and also do that on my phone. The amount of times I’v messed around in regedit, cmd, bios, eventviewer etc. is beyond what I can remember. I’ve been adopting windows versions early since Vista came out too.
I’ve never really been happy with stable. Maybe I this question should be «Arch vs Fedora» instead, but I’m not cocky enough(yet) I guess 😂