I am not bad with computers and have a beginner+, maybe intermediate level knowledge of Linux and I kept running into some problems here and there with different distros. Most claimed to work out of the box (which may be the case for some users, but I have a removed ass Nvidia 1060 and that was not at all the case, until I installed Nobara KDE/Nvidia.
Just came here to potentially save someone time, this removed is actually working out of the box, closest experience to this was with Arch, but that’s definitely not out of the box.
Be careful with Nobara. I’ve also used it for a bit (fedora 38 base) and had an easier time setting it up than fedora 39. It disables most security features to get better performance. Besides that, it’s only developed by one dude and primarily for personal use, so when it went from 38 to 39 he just completely dropped his gnome config, broke the upgrade in so many ways, and switched to kde. Also it didn’t have an upgrade notification and I had to accidentally learn that a new major version came out.
Dropped it after that because it doesn’t inspire confidence, no matter how important GE is for gaming on Linux. I’d rather spend at most an hour setting up MX (Debian) for gaming.
I tried Nobara and quickly ran into the lone developer problem when it didn’t support secure boot. I don’t really see the point of secure boot when the machine will still accept any USB I stick in there, but most other distros seem to handle it. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time working on it and later find other unsupported things.
So I switched to Bazzite, which other people keep recommending, and that seems to work fine. AMD GPU over here tho, YMMV.
Nobara was my first attempt at leaving windows for good and it was great until it wasn’t. I went a few months without ever booting windows but started having issues when I bought a new gpu. I went from Nvidia to AMD and everything I read online said you just install the AMD gpu, nothing else needed to be done. Every game I tried to play and would crash within 20 minutes every single time. I eventually got so frustrated that I just booted windows, ran DDU, downloaded adrenaline and I was up and running. After I got settled in, I nuked nobara and installed bazzite and haven’t had a single issue since.
I’ve seen this recommendation a few times now, this is working flawlessly for now, so I’ll keep running it, but if and when it doesn’t, I’ll try this out. I gotta say, as a whole, installing most of these has been a breeze, and none of them have had the annoyances that comes with a fresh windows install (do you wanna be tracked, do you want ads, wheres your acct, are you sure you wanna not use edge, etc.)
Good to hear I might be on a painless track! I’m also really loving the idea of rpm-ostree. Kinda interested in setting up one of those automatic builds, just to learn.