Nobara Linux hasn’t been out very long (less than a year), but its “simple point-and-click user experience” keeps getting better! I first reviewed ‘Nobara Linux 36‘ at my Linux Newbie blog hub on 9/19/2022, and then ‘again‘ at my new self-hosted Karmi’s Musings & Tech blog on 11/7/2022.
Thomas Crider – ‘GloriousEggroll‘
His GitHub page says:
- Software Maintenance Engineer @ Red Hat. Wine-Staging maintainer. Tinkerer.
His Website (in my added brief) says:
- WHEW. So…. if any of you have been keeping up with me on social media, you know I’ve been busy these last few years, and I’m very sorry I’ve neglected to keep this website up to date (Bad GE! 😉 ) .. One of the biggest issues is that alot of my articles get bombarded by spam that needs moderating (that’s one of the reasons I don’t have a comment section on my Blogs.) .. It’s also kind of been a roller coaster. Since I started working at Red Hat in 2019, I’ve now been promoted two times — and am currently a Software Maintenance Engineer. As some of you know about a year ago I also started nobaraproject.org, which is my own Linux distribution based on Fedora.
The Nobara page asks:
What is the Nobara Project?
- This site is a work in progress. (It’s come a long way, for a “work in progress,” in a very short time, IMHO. 👍) .. The Nobara Project, to put it simply, is a modified version of Fedora Linux with user-friendly fixes added to it. Fedora is a very good workstation OS, however, anything involving any kind of 3rd party or proprietary packages is usually absent from a fresh install. A typical point and click user can often struggle with how to get a lot of things working beyond the basic browser and office documents that come with the OS without having to take extra time to search documentation. Some of the important things that are missing from Fedora, especially with regards to gaming include WINE dependencies, obs-studio, 3rd party codec packages such as those for gstreamer, 3rd party drivers such as NVIDIA drivers, and even small package fixes here and there .. This project aims to fix most of those issues and offer a better gaming, streaming, and content creation experience out of the box. More importantly, we want to be more point and click friendly, and avoid the basic user from having to open the terminal. It’s not that the terminal and/or terminal usage are a bad thing by any means, power users are more than welcome to continue with using the terminal, but for new users, point and click ease of use is usually expected.
Nobara 37 Improvements
1) Main improvement I saw this time, wid a focus on “new users,” was the move from Anaconda (installer) to the Calamares (universal installer framework):
Much easier for “new users,” and I don’t have to insert installation images for the Anaconda (installer) in this review – \o/ ’Hippity hip Hoorah’ \o/ 😁
2) A couple of bugs from my last review have been fixed.
3) Point & Click was already great, but it has also improved.
4) ISO went from 4.83GBs down to a 2.75GB Nobara-37-Official-2023-01-06.iso this time – WOW!
I am sure there were many other improvements also, but I noticed those four during brief testing.
- NOTE: Only issue I had was not being able to get the UFR II/UFRII LT Printer Driver for Linux V5.60 Canon MF3010 printer driver to work. Same driver works great on Fedora 37 Cinnamon SPIN ‘n another Fedora-based OS I’ve tested it on.
Installing Nobara 37
They recommend using Balena Etcher to burn the ISO to your USB stick.
I used a 16GB SanDisk USB for installation media ‘n a 120 SSD for the test Target disk.
I let it test the media before starting the installation.
Am the Fulltime Root User on all my computers, i.e., I hate annoying “Authenticate” popups slowing my workflow, so I keep the standard user’s password different from the root/admin user:
That’s about it for the installation, which went fast ‘n easy! If you’ve had problems installing Fedora, then give Nobara 37 a try.
Post Installation
During reboot, I select “not listed” and login as root at the Login Screen…after that, Nobara 37 gives me this Login Screen:
- NOTE: The camera on my new Jitterbug Smart3 phone works better than my regular camera for taking display screen shots, and much easier to use. Not a great pic, but good enough for a screen shot with a camera. Can’t believe I avoided Smart phones ‘n used flip-phones for years!?! 😉
Everything is pretty automatic ‘n Point & Click after the login. It even spotted my Nvidia GPU ‘n asked me if I wanted the driver for it:
Nobara is also focused on Gaming, so your Nvidia GPU needs to be new enough for the new NVIDIA drivers like:
That’s the new 525 driver version.
Here’s the About:
Here’s the DE:
They offer three versions of Nobara: Official, GNOME, and KDE. I now go wid the Official version (GNOME’s functionality wid a KDE layout)…like MS Windows and/or Cinnamon DE.
Conclusion
So user friendly, for a Linux OS, that even Windows users could grow wid this new ‘Up & Coming‘ Linux OS.
Started around July of 2022 ‘n it keeps getting better…FAST!