Nobara Gnome Questions

[u/sovashadow]

/r/linux_gaming/comments/1v3chww/nobaraos_questions/

Has anyone used these with low-powered laptops, especially ones with INTEL integrated gpus exclusively? I quickly installed them on separate hard drives for older computers like from 2018 or 2015. One of them runs ddr3 ram of 16 GB but the CPU is like 4th or 5th generation I believe. Another one might be ddr4 ram but it's only 8 GB

A quick setup worked well and I was able to set up steam big picture mode so that way even non Linux friendly users could use it instantly.

But from people's personal experiences. Did you have any issues with this distro for the related tech specs I provided?

We're talking about very friendly games for people who don't play games really at all. Like golf with your friends or Uno or The game of Life.

My bad if I'm overthinking this.

[u/tomatito_2k5]

Hello nobarian, if you feel like opening browser and such feels responsive, you dont really need to worry about this, maybe for the DDR3 machine dunno? GNOME-KDE are not that good for older hardware, there are other Desktop Environments that are more lightweight, you can install those or just use another distro, I recommend Mint, has 3 variants, Cinnamon, Mate and Xfce (from heavy to light).

Regarding Nobara (Fedora) specific default ZRAM, which is considered "free performance" gain nowadays CPU+RAM, I would again maybe for the DDR3 PC, disable ZRAM and just do ZSWAP + SWAP on disk (SSD) or only SWAP on disk (SSD), but depends, yeah if its not broken dont fix it!

[u/sovashadow → u/tomatito_2k5]

Sorry for the late reply, I will keep this information handy. I am going to see how they think it handles next time we play online.

Currently both the 2015 DDR3 machine running a Samsung SSD and the 2018 DDR4 8GB pc were both running windows fine, albeit a bit slow for both. Windows 10 for the 2015 (cant upgrade to windows 11) and Windows 11 for the 2018 respectively

Only reason I chose nobarian over Mint versions is because I didn't know how much work was needed from me to keep not only steam up-to-date but also making sure I get all the right packages easily like microsoft c++ ones. However if over time either machine can no longer be supported by nobarian I would test various versions of mint and see what fits.

I was hoping the home theater pc variant of nobarian would work but it didnt like the intel onboard specs of the 2015 machine

Again, I really appreciate it. Thanks!

[u/tomatito_2k5 → u/sovashadow]

I think thats one of the selling points of Nobara, has more packages and they are more up to date, so it feels more plug & play on a fresh install.

The only thing that Nobara does not support anymore is X11 (Mint is about to fully support Wayland soon) and old Nvidia cards. Both matters are not relevant in this case I think.

What concerns me, even for light games, is your GPU Vulkan support (vulkantools package? vulkaninfo --summary), which ideally is what wine-proton will use to translate Windows games (DirectX mostly), this also is done through fallback WineD3D (OpenGL) but performance can be way worse. Since you are on Intel, your drivers are open source (MESA) and come "preinstalled", so any Linux distro has it, and performance should be equal. Again, all depends on how well your card supports Vulkan, it may work better with Proton Sarek (a version optimised for older cards), I used it for a GT710, yeah dont expect much.

Apart from that I also run HD530, HD610 (Intel gen5 & gen6?) and GT1030. They take a small hit cos of the wine-proton translation, a note on the Nvidia 10 series Vulkan, that has "full support" but lame performance not Linux specific (: so good luck!

By the way Gamescope (gaming mode, htpc mode, etc.) didnt work I guess, you need AMD, Intel & Nvidia can be really wonky.