Nobara with KDE
Something that I really like about Linux is the large number of distributions that exist and that each of them has a specific purpose that makes it have its certain number of followers, say distributions focused on security, for audio editing and video, for critical environments, for the educational field, among others.
And although a large part of the existing distributions are derived from others, as I already mentioned, they have their purpose and in the case of Nobara, it is no exception, because although Fedora directly offers its Fedora Games spin, it has no point of comparison with Nobara.
What is Nobara Linux?
As we mentioned in the title, Nobara is a derivative of Fedora and is aimed at gaming and streaming on Linux. It has additional fixes to address known issues with games, streaming, and content creation tasks.
On the project website, Nobara is described as:
Some of the important things missing from Fedora, especially with respect to gaming, include dependencies on WINE, obs-studio, third-party codec packs like those from gstreamer, third-party drivers like NVIDIA drivers, and even small package fixes. here and there. .
This project aims to fix most of those issues and deliver a better gaming, streaming, and content creation experience out of the box. More importantly, we want to be easier to point and click and prevent the basic user from having to open the terminal. Not that the terminal and/or using the terminal is a bad thing by any means, advanced users are more than welcome to continue using the terminal, but for new users, point-and-click ease of use is generally expected.
nobara is a project by Glorious Eggroll, a Red Hat contributor who also actively contributes to projects such as WINE, Lutris, among others. This distribution is distinguished by its focus on providing a user experience ready to perform gaming and/or streaming tasks.
About Nobara
Given the nature of Nobara, the distribution involves proprietary components commonly used in workstations, as codecs and multimedia controllers. Besides, incorporates packages that are not present in the Fedora repository, such as OBS Studio, Steam, Lutris, and additional Wine dependencies. The main goal is to eliminate the need for post-installation steps, providing a seamless user experience from the start.
The project addresses various areas, from improvements in gaming latency through patches to the Linux kernel to solving specific problems with OpenRGB. Additionally, it uses the amdgpu driver for older GPUs and is offers support for devices like Steam Deck and Microsoft Surface. Nobara is also working to improve compatibility with ASUS laptops, fix issues related to using Wayland and the nouveau driver, and replace SELinux with AppArmor.
nobara has the most recent versions of Mesa and Wine, compiled directly from the project repositories, as well as patches for SDL2, optimizations for Blender to include support for FFmpeg and the HIP ray tracing library, as well as patches for H.264 and H.265/HEVC hardware encoding on AMD, NVIDIA and Intel systems.
A distinctive feature of Nobara is the default enabling of the RPMFusion repository, providing access to a broader set of packages. The OnlyOffice office suite is also included in the distribution.
What's new in Nobara 39?
Currently, the distributionand found on its Nobara 39 version (in reference to the most current version of Fedora, which is Fedora 39).
Regarding the new features presented at Nobara 39, it stands out that KDE is used in the main edition instead of GNOME, Session performance improvements have been implemented based on the Gamescope composite server.
Also highlighted are performance improvements in Steam and OBS Studio, as well as Improved interfaces for installing updates and login greetings, plus options have been added to install patches for Steam and Davinci Resolve.
Download and get Nobara 39
For those interested in being able to try and/or install this distribution on their computer, you should know that you can obtain the system images on its official website where the editions with KDE (3.6 GB) Gnome (3.5 GB) and variants are offered. of these images with proprietary NVIDIA drivers, as well as for the SteamDeck. The link is this.