I’ve always experienced weird annoying bugs, and I much prefer the UX and minimalism of gnome. It’s better for productivity. I don’t just use my desktop for gaming.
This is my complaint as well. KDE certainly has advantages and neat design ideas, but I always come across some major bugs that make my device unusable.
Definitely not saying GNOME doesn’t have bugs as well though.
Well, Nobara is a gaming-oriented distribution and as the changelog outlines, does Plasma currently offer technological benefits. As is the case with everything, this isn’t set in stone and might change at some point but right now the main target audience for paid development work for Gnome are corporate users where for Plasma it’s being Desktop Mode for Steam Deck.
But why? Not being the default doesn’t mean that Gnome isn’t available. As both are Fedora derivatives, both should have good Gnome support inherited from Fedora anyway. As the changelog says, only a handful of Gnome Shell extensions will no longer be provided in the Nobara repository but instaling them manually from extensions.gnome.org is a breeze.
They still have a gnome ISO, but you’re going to throw it out because it isnt the “official” version. That sounds like a hissy fit.
The non-official KDE previous version was fine, since the point of the distro is the backend optimizations for gaming and editing. Its not what DE leads point since you can add whatever Fedora has in the repos, which is pretty much everything.
While I don’t know the term hissy fit, switching distributions just because the default of a user-changeable setting is different is definitively a bit over the top.
Speaking on Bazzite, KDE is our default to match SteamOS, but we put more effort into the GNOME release if anything due to us trying to maintain feature parity with Valve’s KDE, including being able to right click and add to steam, use the desktop nested, enable VRR, add custom themes based on the ones Valve shipped, and add the steam deck wallpapers ported to GNOME.
That being said, GE’s points about GNOME are very real, and they have a lot of catching to do in regards to gaming. KDE has DRM Leasing, VRR and HDR right now.
As I understand it, that’s not even needed because the current DE choice is being preserved at an upgrade. The only thing that needs manual tweaking is reinstalling the extensions from the Gnome website which isn’t really an issue at all.
Interesting to read those linked GNOME issue threads, they’re really living up to their reputation… Looks like KDE is becoming the premier gaming DE, and I’m pretty happy with that.
IDK , Nobara is really stable. The main difference for me was that it comes with all the AV codecs you could need, and a few tweaks for gaming. Saved me a lot of time in the end.
This is a shit-tier post. Why hide the relevant information that’s 2 sentences long?
Relevant information:
Better integration with Steam. By default the Steam Deck uses KDE as the desktop mode. This inherently means it receives updates from Valve in terms of desktop related fixes, and they are actively working with KDE developers to bring updates to KDE (reddit.com/…/is_there_any_cooperation_with_valve_…)
I know reading is hard but you realize this quote was reason #5 of the many reasons listed… I’m not going to copy-paste the article, it’s all relevant info.
Why chromium is explained in the article (better support for many apps) but you can always change it to firefox, also detailed in the upgrade article.
I upgraded from 38 to 39 with no issues. It’s honestly not hard or dangerous, just copy paste a few lines then paste the last ones to prompt the upgrade. The only catch is that if you had KDE already you won’t need to remove some of the packages it tells you about. Don’t overthink it imo.
I’d like a less painful way to update, but I’m also probably ready to backup and reinstall at this point.
During the 36/37 update my bluetooth stopped working, despite everything saying it’s working. I’ve lived with that for a while but it’s slowly starting to irk me.
The existence of both is justified for their unique merits. However, I’d argue that the ‘immutable’/atomic model makes more sense for a system that’s dedicated towards gaming.
For a general daily driver, it all comes down to your specific needs. If Bazzite satisfies those, I’d argue it’s the safer pick. However, if (for some reason) Bazzite falls short^[1]^, then go for Nobara instead.
There’s a lot more to it than this, but I kept it short for the sake of brevity.
Honestly, there’s only very little that Bazzite actually can’t do. Though its unique workflow might require some adjusting. Regardless, if you go for Bazzite, ensure to take a proper look at its documentation.
xD, it’s done by typing three times “-” or “*” next to each other with nothing else on the line itself and the lines before and after. So to illustrate it with quotation marks:
“(Empty)”
“—” (or “***”)
“(Empty)”
Note that in the above example, i had to leave another empty line in between the lines. So it’s not exactly correct. Unfortunately, without a break line, I can’t even illustrate it. So, this is done from necessity. Though, it means that technically, the stars below were one “/” removed from becoming a line.
I am very interested in what you are saying. I’ve been trying Bazzite for a while now and I ran into some quirks I couldn’t resolve - tiny stuff, that’s mainly a small inconvenience like not being able to put icons on the desktop with Steam due to it being Flatpak and Valve not having enabled that specific option) -
BUT -
I’ve also tried Nobara then was kinda put off by people saying something along the lines, that GE disabled some security features for better performance (and since it was a distro for personal use at first) and I tried to search for the details, but came up empty. Could you say a bit more about this or where I could find more info, please? Cause I’m using my distro as daily driver and not only for gaming, so it got me worried a little.
Oh I think I’ve found my answer, it was about SELinux being disabled. Now it says on their official website: “SELinux:
– We have replaced SELinux with AppArmor (AppArmor is used in Ubuntu and OpenSUSE) as we find it to be more user-friendly, less intrusive, and easier to write policies for. You will still see some SELinux packages as they are required to keep Fedora compatibility and not break package dependencies.”
Yup. That’s basically it. AppArmor isn’t a slouch either, but SELinux works well and is well-tested on Fedora. It’s a pity. I do think that SELinux > AppArmor, so if security is a serious concern of yours, then it’s worth considering Bazzite over Nobara. If, however, security is a top priority of yours, you might even consider secureblue. It’s not great for gaming though 😅. At some point, hardening clashes with performance gains…
Oh yes, that’s entirely my own fault. I first installed Aurora, then Steam as Flapak and later rebased to Bazzite. It was all just for trying stuff out, on my main machine, the install will be clean.
Think of it like you have a base OS that is stock, like Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite. Then the different ublue offerings, Bluefin/Aurora/Bazzite/Ucore take those and add new things on top. If you rebase, anything you installed as a user isn’t touched. But all of the addons change to whatever the default is for that ublue variant.
So someone rebasing from Bluefin/Aurora to Bazzite will have Lutris and Steam (and other gaming specific software and system tweaks) automatically ‘layered’ as part of the default experience, since Bazzite is targeted primarily at gaming, and the other two for general desktop use.
You’re swapping out the default system image, just like when you update and the update is actually just replacing your entire OS with the new version (until the feature that let’s them only replace things that have changed gets finished).
Yes. They use the official Fedora atomic images as their base, then add things from there. Silverblue/Bluefim has GNOME and Kinoite/Aurora/Bazzite has KDE. Then they just have more stuff that Fedora can’t or won’t ship, such as built-in proprietary drivers for Nvidia GPUs without any extra repos or downloads, and the Xone driver for Xbox Wireless Controllers.
You could technically do all of this yourself, but it’d be a lot of work and be slower. For Ublue, a lot of things are on the image, as in baked into the OS as part of the iso and standard install. For things you layer yourself, the OS has keep track of what is stock and what isn’t, then act accordingly with each update. So the more things you personally layer versus installing through their preferred methods like Distrobox, Brew, or Flatpak, the longer the system takes to update. Layering some stuff like Steam is also not straightforward, so its beneficial to have a system that has most of the things you need. The phrase they like to use is crowdsourcing your OS. If everyone has mostly the same base OS, support is easier, bugs are fixed faster, etc.
They follow the main release schedule of Fedora but frequently contribute things upstream and take their own approach by integrating things from Nobara, ChimeraOS, and OpenSUSE’s Aeon/Kalpa. Folks from those groups collaborate back and forth.
nobaraproject.org
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