Fedora stability + the software and tweaks players crave
Jason Evangelho
What happens when a senior Red Hat engineer, member of the Lutris development team and creator of Proton-GE decides to create a Linux distribution? Well, the aforementioned titles are owned by the same person, Thomas Crider (aka “Glorious Eggroll). And what you get is the promising Nobara Project, a Fedora-powered distro aimed squarely at gamers and content creators. .
“Fedora is a very good desktop operating system, however, anything involving third-party or proprietary packages is usually missing from a fresh install,” says Crider.
Crider’s overall goal is to take the solid foundation of Fedora and make gaming, content creation, and streaming easier for the “typical point-and-click user.” Achieving this goal, says Crider, involves never expecting a user to need to open the terminal.
Additional software included in Nobara:
Beyond that, there’s a comprehensive and thoughtful list of packages, software, and patches bundled in the Nobara Project ISOs:
- O.B.S. Studio
- Codec packages such as those for gstreamer
- Proprietary (and/or) Nvidia drivers
- Custom MESA-ACO Drivers for AMD Radeon Users
- Various wine outbuildings
- Lutris (a newer version than the one available in the Fedora repositories)
However, the Nobara project goes beyond simply inserting additional packages on the ISO. For example, RPM Fusion repositories are enabled by default. This definitely removes some friction from the user.
Additionally, Crider will eventually use X11 as the default desktop renderer (although Wayland will remain a switchable option). As he argues (and I agree with), X11 is still more compatible for gaming, and it’s needed for things like Proton-GE’s AMD FSR patch.
Small touches complete the mix, like the availability of Xow (Xbox One wireless dongle driver) and proprietary firmware required for automatic installation on first run. The kernel also receives fsync injected. Pleasant!
It is still very early for the Nobara project. Crider has a to-do list, including adding Proton-GE and Wine-GE builds, and augmenting OBS-Studio with a browser plugin and vulkan + opengl capture.
Currently, the distribution shares the same look and feel as a standard Fedora Workstation installation. But he plans to implement a custom Nobara theme in the near future.
Where to get the Nobara distribution based on Fedora
Good news: Nobara Workstation 35 is available in GNOME and KDE versions. You can even roll your own ISO with the instructions found here.
Check the Nobara website (which is just a placeholder for now) for more information. You can download the ISOs here:
Nobara 35 Workstation (GNOME) | Nobara 35 Workstation (KDE)
