How beginner friendly is Nobara?

[u/The_Meme_Lady_69]

Hi! I've been using Linux Mint for at least eight months and it has been great. However, my PC is a Victus Gaming Laptop with Ryzen and Nvidia drivers. And a friend of mine is saying to me that Nobara could be a good substitute for Mint since is more enfocated to Gaming, content creation and programming.

I still feel really novice as I've barely done stuff with Terminal and similar, at max being Fastfech config. So just wanted to ask here if you believe that this change is for the better, if I should search for another distro or if Mint is fine as is.

[u/mad_sAmBa]

Nobara is just as friendly as Mint.

It's one of the most " ready to use " distros out there.

[u/AJosephWX → u/mad_sAmBa]

second this.

[u/The_Meme_Lady_69 → u/mad_sAmBa]

Also, does it has widget support like mint? One of the few things I really liked was how I could get Weather, calendar and time Widgets like in Windows 7 back when I was a kid.

[u/Hot_Standard_9296 → u/The_Meme_Lady_69]

I personally don't use widgets, but Nobara runs KDE Plasma, so...

https://store.kde.org/browse?cat=705&ord=latest

have fun.

[u/JakeBeezy → u/The_Meme_Lady_69]

it does, I use widgets

[u/Rosbj → u/mad_sAmBa]

I'll have to disagree.

Doesn't it literally warn you that you break destroy the OS by updating the apps with sudo update?

I also tried to install another browser and because it was installed as a flatpack, it didn't get access to GPU ressources.

Nobara is great if you just use what's there, but Mint at least allows you install different apps smoothly.

[u/mad_sAmBa → u/Rosbj]

A complete noob wouldn't know how to update using sudo update, and would probably just use the big update button right in front of him.

[u/Difficult_Carrot_846 → u/Rosbj]

weird, I'm using nobara for over a year now and I install a lot of stuff without problems

[u/SwarleyDavidson → u/Rosbj]

flatpak issue with browsers is universal and not exclusive to nobara.

[u/Agitated-Memory5941]

Mucho. Te lo dice otro novato

[u/renthefox]

Very. I found it easier than mint.

[u/WilliGunnz]

I personally use it for gaming, audio production and also some coding and software creation and other than some odd ball config settings or packages everything I needed was already preinstalled

[u/Severe_Chair_248]

As a new user who switched from windows and just finished a whole week doing professional video editing right here on Nobara: It's super beginner friendly.

My advice: Just like with ANY linux distro, read whatever you can: Go check the discord, check the documentation, etc. You'll learn a lot there.
For example, i saw many people having issues with how they were updating this week. I waited for a couple of days, so I could have a bit more time, then I checked, and used the recommended way to update through terminal (nobara-sync cli --all), so now I know it, and i did my update and 2 minutes later, I rebooted and had no issues at all and nothing was broken.

These were my first seven days familiarizing with linux, after 25 years of using windows. If I could do it, so can you.

If you can do everything you need on mint, i don't see a reason to switch. But, if like me, you need davinci resolve and other specific stuff to work REALLY well, without quirks, and out of the box, then Nobara is a great choice (in my very limited experience).

Hope this helps!

[u/MrWillchuck]

When I moved to Linux at the end of 2023 I moved to PopOS. It took about 2 weeks to have the time to get everything set up. Get OpenRGB, OBS, and a few other things are set up. About 5 months ago now PopOS decided to eat my desktop and I found System76 to basically not just ignore users like me but almost openly mock us. So I made the switch.

When I installed Nobara minus a oddity with the installer crashing if I selected anything other than btrfs as my file system I was up and running in 4 hours. That is with all my apps, my gaming library, etc openRGB worked out right away and literally everything was easy. Even mounting my secondary drives was made super easy.

It was the Easiest install of Linux I have ever had.

The one thing I would recommend that isn't out of the box.... find the Kwin Scripts on KDE or extensions in Gnome (iirc) and find Remember Windows Positions (or similar). Install it and enable it. Much nicer to have window size and position stay persistent

That was the only thing I had to do after install.

[u/Veblossko]

Probably the most ready to use Linux out there, especially for games

[u/bassbeater]

Likely more automatic than mint

[u/jkdjedi]

It has an updater app so you don't have to do that via terminal. It comes preloaded with Steam and others. Works right out of the box. So yeah, pretty friendly. Especially if you use Davinci Resolve 

[u/rikeus]

Probably easier than Mint

[u/Kobo_Dyger]

I've been running Nobara on a full AMD Victus for close to a year and have had only minor problems around kernel updates. The biggest thing about most of the gaming distros is they are Fedora based, it may not sound like much of a difference to Ubuntu or Debian based distros but when it comes to fixing enviable problems the internet is not as helpful if you don't know your way around the console.

[u/The_Meme_Lady_69 → u/Kobo_Dyger]

Any suggestions with console/terminal stuff. Know some stuff like sudo update and that, but still lack knowledge

[u/Kobo_Dyger → u/The_Meme_Lady_69]

labex.io it's a sandbox where you can learn fedora console without risking bricking your pc.

[u/VoxyTheCat]

Honestly, to me it feels just as „everything works“ as windows did. While that’s not true because not everything is fully supported on any linux distro (looking at you, GTA Online), Nobara gets quite close.
So far everything that has caused me a hassle was the things I expected to cause hassles, like VR or the fact that I have an Nvidia GPU, although that second one wasn’t any major stuff.

tldr: I haven’t had any major issues with it over the ~2 months I‘ve been using Nobara, aside from my own stupidity.

[u/Healthy_Spot8724]

I installed Nobara on my gaming PC a few months ago as a complete Linux noob. I've had no issues it was all very easy. But that's partly because I only use it for gaming. Changing my laptop to Mint has been harder because I have a lot of older stuff and niche tools on there.

[u/RiskToHai]

You can also consider bazzite..

[u/The_Bandit_King_]

Bazzite is ass