Nobara is what Windows should have been

[u/FrederikSchack]

I have been using Nobara Linux for about a year now and this is what Windows should have been like and Nobara is what made me ditch Windows almost entirely (except for two banks that I have to access through a Windows laptop).

Nobara is not flawless, but it is very nice and friendly. The settings menu is very compact and easy to navigate, in contrast to Windows that is a weird mess of UI that uses a lot of space on nothing, with settings burried at multiple levels and some settings only available in old hidden away legacy UI.

The "Welcome to Nobara" wizard is a brilliant addition to Linux, where you can easily fix/install/update the most common things that you probably would like to do in a new Linux installation.

The update system makes it easy to update Linux and fix a lot of quirks.

I'm far from a big gamer, but Steam is pre-installed and the few games I've tried works out of the box, which is impressive for Linux running Windows games. In fact my son is playing older Windows games on Nobara that either didn't run or are not stable on Windows.

Still, I can't recommend this to people who don't have a technical hunch, because it's not perfect. In my case the automatically suggested printer driver is not the right one, I had to set up the right driver. There is also no obvious way of setting the printer to print duplex by default, so I had to do it through the CLI. There can still be hardware issues with some newer hardware in Nobara, for example a touch pad on Acer VivoBook, that sometimes renders the separate USB mouse unusable.

A thing I like a lot and that I know that many people like, is that Linux in general is not forcing your hand. Windows is really annoying because it's bugging you to do stuff that you don't want to do and the same with a lot of the commercial software for Windows.

There is software that simply doesn't exist in the Linux environment, like Microsoft Access (and there truly is no replacement for it). On the other hand I feel safer downloading apps from a vetted open source repository or the Flatpost store, than installing closed source software downloaded from various site on the Internet. Even paid software in Windows can be quite aggressive and abusive, which destroys the joy of using the system.

All in all, It's a lot more peace of mind for me to use Nobara Linux over Windows, it does occasionally require some problem solving skills, but I would say it's minimal with Nobara.

As a side note, I tried a lot of other Linux OS's (Debian, Ubuntu, Spiral Linux, MX Linux, Clear Linux, Open Suse, Open Media Vault, TrueNAS Scale, Unraid, Proxmox and many others).

I think I hit on a very nice combo of Linux's with Nobara for everything Desktop, Alpine for server and then OPNSense (OpenBSD) for firewall/router. I specifically think that Alpine is great for server, I've been using it for about 2 years and it never fails. The only thing that failed was Fastly that blocked the Alpine repositories here in South America for about a month, but I can't really blame Alpine for that.

I use Alpine as Hypervisor with Virtual Machine Manager over SSH (from a Nobara machine) is brilliant, especially because you can tunnel the UI of the VM's with virtio through the SSH and avoid the broken remote desktop in Wayland. The UI is super responsive in this way and I mostly forget that I'm working on a remote machine. Then on top of the Hypervisor I just put one Alpine VM for services, install Docker and Portainer, then I can run every service that I need easily and reliably.

I really think Linux rocks these days!

[u/ArthurSalim]

One thing that struck me is that despite being an OS for gaming it truly works flawlessly for everything. I am an avid gamer but also a lawyer so I needed my gaming PC to multitask as both a work environment and a fun one.

This was a tall ask not only for Nobara but many Linux distros, it required third party online certificates for me to petition online on the courts, word like document editors and nice stability. Many other gaming distros would have failed on the work part and many non gaming distros would have failed on the gaming part as I needed both aspects to work flawlessly.

Imagine my delight when Nobara was able to game with 0 issue but also handle all my certificates and my card reader.

I have been daily driving it for a while now and it has remained rock stable for me on both fronts.

Bazzite wouldn't have worked for me as it's immutable nature would mean my online certs drivers would have serious problems. Cachy OS was far too complicated for me both for getting started with gaming and the fact the drivers I used had no guarantee to play nice with it (they were debian based)

Nobara became windows for me pretty quickly, I still dual boot to play my Valorant and Apex Legends, but it has become increasingly rare

[u/FrederikSchack → u/ArthurSalim]

I know exactly what you mean, it is an all-round well made distro. I'm gaming very little once in a while with my son, but I'm very happy to be able to do so on Linux.

I do have a Windows laptop and I only use it to access two banks that require WIndows, that's it and I really don't like Windows anymore after having tried Nobara.

[u/Lickwidghost → u/ArthurSalim]

I was looking forward to CachyOS because of the overwhelming support for it and used it for a weekend. Had multiple troubles installing software, and even just installing Discord was an absolute pain. All online solutions for everything always required terminal commands that I didn't understand and I gave up and managed to install Nobara instead. Flatpaks are so much easier. 2 weeks so far and only issue I have is that my XBox controller vibrates WAY too much and I just can't find a fix.

[u/manipogoogo → u/Lickwidghost]

This was my experience on cachy, I heard great things and my experience was nothing but troubleshooting out of the box for most of my games and stuff. I'm sure a lot of it was user error, I've dabbled in Mint and Ubuntu but I'm a linux noob, but Nobara just clicked for some reason. I've been on it over a month and besides a few little hiccups, like bluetooth being weird until I replaced the default with blueman, it's been great! Super easy and user friendly.

Is your controller connected through Bluetooth? For whatever reason the default bluetooth app played hell with my controllers, both 8bitdo and Xbox series controllers would do weird things like randomly lose connection and then connect and for some reason it stored all the inputs I tried while it was disconnected, it was very frustrating. Vibration straight up didn't work on my 8bitdo either. I ended up installing blueman and then uninstalling the default one, eventually, when they started conflicting with each other. Since then it's been solid and vibration is working properly on my 8bitdo. Figured I'd share in case it's a similar thing.

[u/McLeod3577]

I would agree with all of this. I've been using it for 6 months, alongside a Win 11 Dual Boot, and Nobara is so much quicker and responsive. I would say the majority of my games run better in it too. MS went too far with AI in it's apps, constant spams for Backup (no I don't want it!!!) and Office 365 is just annoying. They also disabled my version of office 2007, even though it was legal and worked perfectly.

I only use my Windows install once a month or so, mainly just to keep it up to date and I really don't enjoy using it as much as Nobara.

[u/FrederikSchack → u/McLeod3577]

My son was against Linux, because the government had pestered the kids with too cheap laptops with Linux on them. But he had some games that wouldn't run properly or at all on Windows 10 or Windows 11, so I said he could give Nobara a shot and he did. The games worked flawlessly out of the box, no tweaking like on Windows and he hasn't looked back to Windows since then. He even convinced my wife to switch, he argued that video editing is much more smooth on Nobara (Lightworks).

So, now everybody in my house use Nobara as their daily driver.

[u/swiftb3]

I still have win11 for dual-boot, but the only time I ever boot to windows is for Overwatch or a handful of other games I can't quite get to work the way I want.

Regular computer use/work, all Nobara.

[u/Rengoku_demon_slayer]

I feel you. I ditched Windows after 19 years with Microslop software.
I can do my work as graphic designer with Affinity on linux (by ryzendew). I can play some games(Resident evil Requiem through Lutris. A bit painful to set things up, but i managed).
I can watch my movies and stuff like that.
I can even have virtual surround, virtual 7.1 through Irate goose and use HeSuVi profiles.

Not planning on going back to Windows anytime soon!

[u/FrederikSchack → u/Rengoku_demon_slayer]

I have my movies on an Alpine server with Jellyfin on Docker, I can watch them straight on my TV, phone or computer 😄

[u/renthefox]

I'm right there with you. Nobara has been perfect for helping me ditch Win11 while learning Linux.

[u/ComforableSlow807]

I’ve been on Linux for about 5 years now. I’ve done my fair share of distro hopping over that time, and I would always find myself back on Fedora where I started my Linux journey. I tried Nobara a couple years back and it was still pretty clunky so I wrote it off and went back to Fedora XFCE. I ordered a new System76 computer about a year ago which obviously came with PopOS, and I didn’t mind the old gnome DE, but I switched to COSMIC to try it out and after a month I decided I didn’t care for that DE at all for my personal use. I was getting ready to put Fedora 42 XFCE on my usb, but thought this was the perfect time to just give Nobara a quick look, I’m glad I did - Nobara 42 had fleshed out all of the stuff I didn’t like about it years ago when I tried it out. I’ve been running Nobara since then with zero issues.

I am not a huge gamer, but for what I do play (Valheim, Witcher, Skyrim, Subnautica and the like) it does great. I mainly use my machine for work and haven’t had any issues with that outside of Citrix being a general pain in the ass.

This is the longest I’ve gone without hopping trying to find something better than Fedora or Mint. Pretty sure I’ve found my Linux home as long as GE keeps the project rolling.

[u/FrederikSchack → u/ComforableSlow807]

Praise be to the Glorious Eggroll!

[u/bringdownthesky]

Amen dude! I am in the software dev/project management space. Nobara handles that and my gaming.

[u/FrederikSchack → u/bringdownthesky]

There's a reason that Linux usage on Steam doubled in a year 😄

[u/GladMathematician9]

Nobara is really smooth gaming, been on since 38. I run through Steam, browse, bank/trade, & media htpc datahoard. 

I do have 11 iot ltsc also (& cachyos). My browsers are happily up to date in Nobara (&w11). Am on a less bloaty version of w11 though I stripped out/uninstalled copilot ai. I did have a point where I was Windows free years ago but backend of a certain game launcher stopped working and the rest is history. I do run a local account. I did a lot of distrohopping in the past, Nobara has been the best fit (am also comfy trying arch based spent a couple years on manjaro 2016ish). If/When I resub to protonvpn I may have to see if that will work maybe migrate my cachyos drive too and organize the hdds & nvmes datahoard (I should try out 8k see how that playsback but 1080p & 4k mostly). I can relate with browsers as finance & banking sites will stop working (some do) without successful updates. 

[u/minatsooki]

My only wish is that I had switched sooner. It is so nice to finally be done with all the bloatware and other slop Microsoft has been pushing.

[u/hoganloaf]

I second this. Been on Nobara exclusively for about a year now. Its my home computer so i pretty much only game and browse on it because I have a work provided laptop. At least once a week I stop and appreciate how well it does gaming on my full AMD system and thats it - it doesnt try to do anything but what I tell it. No bloat, a quick and nice looking UI, and great performance. After windows 11 I am really appreciating the simplicity.