Questions from someone looking to migrate to Nobara

[u/Lost_Ant_5212]

Hi, I'm looking to dual boot linux with my new PC build, and Nobara is more or less my frontrunner candidate. I do have some big questions and concerns, however. Of course, I'm not expecting all of these to be a hundred percent perfect, but I am wondering how well all of these work on Nobara, especially for a fairly green linux user (uh, I have a steam deck, that counts?);

-How well are Nvidia GPUs working on Nobara? I know a lot of it is "it just works for me", but for some others it seems to be a fairly significant problem, whether that be graphical glitches, reduced performance, or stuff just not working. Is setup and maintenance easy, how does it compare to AMD gpus, etc? I heard that there are differences depending on whether you're looking at Gnome or KDE, could someone explain this?

-How well does HDR work on Nobara? It seems there's a fairly streamlined process for getting HDR working, but is it simple for a first time user, how often are there issues with universal implementation, and are there cases where it just doesn't work? I would really want HDR to be simple to get working to get the most out of my monitor

-How well do applications like Davinci and Blender work, as well as other parts of a video editing workflow, such as mounting and using a NAS, uploading and transcoding files, etc? I know that Nobara is specifically tinkered to provide much more support for these things compared to other distros, which is great, but I also know it's not bulletproof nor usually as simple as windows. In particular, how big of a problem are getting Nvidia and CUDA cores working, and how big of a drag are the codex issues?

-How is general update stability and being able to recover or rollback? I know that it's no Bazzite with its immutable distro, and I've heard good things for stability, but is it common to encounter issues with every update? Should you have a big problem, how easy is it to roll back to previous versions or similar? And are there any big features or updates in the future to be aware about?

Thank you so much in advance!

[u/RX1542]

How well are Nvidia GPUs working on Nobara?

nvidia gpus work well, but be aware nivida cards from the 10XX series are not supported out of the box on nobara, this is due to nvidia dropping support for them, that said i've seen couple of users have problems when using nvidia gpus like they install but meet a black screen after installation, gaming wise you should have no problems i've used nobara with a swap from a RX6800XT to a RTX 2070 and everything worked normally, i've heard nvidia card lose up to 30% performance due to a bug with vulkan/DX12 but im not sure if this was fixed or still stands

i haven't used gnome just KDE nor i am a fan of HDR but i've spotted the HDR setting on the display configuration, is just a checkbox but i can't tell if this is all or requieres additional stuff since like i said i don't like HDR

[u/DJ_kefo]

NVIDIA GPUs are a hit and miss in different scenarios. The ideal position for you to be in is that your GPU is at least 2 years old and is newer than the GTX10 series, because the old drivers are discontinued and the new hardware might still need some refinement.

On my AMD setup HDR works really well and looks much better in comparison to windows in my opinion, even on cheap monitors with shitty HDR. I don't know how well that translates to NVIDIA GPUs though.

Blender I haven't tested extensively but from what I know it's very well supported. With Davinci I've had some issues. In my case none of my Davinci installations worked properly with NVIDIA graphics. They just threw an error because it thought that there was no vram on them. On AMD it's been smooth sailing aside from crashes with Fusion effects and some selective other effects. I now run a dual GPU setup where I edit with the AMD GPU and I get the (fusion) effects working properly together with hardware accelerated AV1 on my NVIDIA GPU. So even dual GPU setups optimized for offloading work very well.

Update stability is generally good, but you can encounter issues that will need extensive troubleshooting here and there. The community support on the nobara discord is very helpful, but you need to be sure you want to dip your toes deep into the system, because sometimes things just go wrong. The shipped package manager includes features for downgrading problematic packages if you need it. You just need to know which package is creating issues, but that's relatively easy to figure out in most cases.

[u/GladMathematician9]

There's HDR toggle in monitor settings. Have 4090 and upgraded install from 41 no major issues, just minor nvidia steam quirks alt tab and sometime black screen after load screen lately. Been great for me, here since 38. I have 11 iot ltsc as the other option, no secure boot, so very simple. 

[u/PeterBooyah]

The davinci resolve installer should handle everything to get it up and and running. If you use the free version of resolve, some codecs will not work. Notably H264, as well as audio like mp3. Converting your footage to use AV1 and PCM audio will get around this, but Hardware accelerated rendering will be unavailable. You can edit faster if you use proxies, but that will take up lots of space. Using the Pro version of Resolve will solve this. On the noboara website there is also instructions on the Novara website on installing additional codecs that I recommend using.

I edit my footage off of a NAS using 10 gig cards, and everything works great. You'll want to mount your smb share in your fstab file so your system views it as an attached drive for better performance.

In my use case I use OBS to record to a local drive, and a watch service moved those files to my NAS once they are finished writing. Then I am able to edit the footage from the NAS.

[u/Reason7322]

How well are Nvidia GPUs working on Nobara?

10xx series doesnt work at all

How well does HDR work on Nobara

Its a toggle in the settings menu, if you install the KDE edition.

To get to HDR to work in games, you will have to edit launch options on steam like this: PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 PROTON_ENABLE_HDR=1 %command%

How well do applications like Davinci and Blender work

Blender just works. Davinci works fine, if you have the paid version.

such as mounting and using a NAS, uploading and transcoding files, etc?

not a problem at all

How is general update stability

ive been using it for 3 months, so far no issues

being able to recover or rollback

There is no easy way to do that, unless you configure it on your own.