So, after EndeavourOSās GRUB comitted suicide, me being too stupid to understand chroot despite wiki ātutorialsā and the community rather trolling & gaslighting me instead of helping I decided to give Nobara a go. Usually I am a Plasma KDE guy, but thought since itās been a long time I try it out, especially since you can have it in a more classic configuration those days again, even though Iād miss out of Wallpaper Engine.
Unfortunately my experience has been nothing but awful. A bunch of random bullet points of my experience:
- I had real trouble connecting my BT headphones. At first it was āconnectedā, but not really. Tried a fresh pairing mode, but then it showed two headphones. Then it connected, but as soon as I tried to adjust the audio input / output settings it lost audio again and I had to repeat it yet again. Now it works, and I decided to never touch the audio settings ever again.
- āFilesā is constantly crashing. Using the search? Crash. Going backwards? Crash. Try to do āsomethingā? Crash. Do nothing? Probably also crash (hyperbolic).
- āFilesā data transfer for copying & deleting files is slow as hell for whatever reason (on decent Samsung SSDs mind you).
- āFilesā cannot multitask. If youāre copying, scanning, deleting or whatever, it wonāt do anything else until that process is done.
- āFilesā and other Gnome applications frequently bug out if you try too many things at once, freezing or crashing them.
- āFilesā, or even Gnome as a whole, is so incredibly scrapped for features to achieve its simplistic look, that it lacks actual functionality.
- Gnomeās settings are also missing for everything, or hidden in a gazillion different config menus, some of which I already forgot how to access again.
- Scaling scales not just the UI, but also 3D applications like games, reducing their actual resolution and making them blurry. The UI seemed to be blurry as well.
- Mullvad VPNās tray icon somehow turned into some three dots with a weird background.
- In the tray menu thereās also a VPN toggle, which shows Mullvad, but being turned off. Turning it on disables my connection and I have to reconnect through Mullvad, which turns the toggle off again. No way to remove the redundant toggle as far as I can tell, but maybe itās in some hidden settings menu that I have yet to find.
- OpenRGB in this does not work with my NZXT Hue 2 Ambient. Keeps asking for resize zones, which according to a search should not be necessary, and wasnāt necessary with the one I used in EOS either. Selecting any color just turns the LEDs off.
- Launching the Battle.net launcher through Lutris it also opens some ghost āOpenGL Rendererā application with it, taking up space on the task bar.
- Battle.net launcher canāt be maximized without constantly resetting or displaying information beneath the task bar.
- Canāt launch .sh files unless I explicitly right click & Run as program.
- Unfortunately it then launches with an additional empty terminal window, yet again taking up space on the task bar.
- Had to create a new FF profile because using my old one somehow was unusable in regards to its performance.
- The weather location for the little clock thingy apparently canāt find anything, city or country, except some locations that arenāt near me.
- Canāt remove my own review in the Software center for one of the apps that I did prematurely.
- Tray area also has this little tiling menu. I tried tiling, hated it. Couldnāt find a way to remove that icon to save space on the task bar.
- After a lot of apps started to hang I tried restarting, just to be left in a blackscreen and the PC not shutting down. Had to hard reset to restart.
- No EurKey keyboard layout. Thereās a āGerman (US)ā one thatās close but itās missing symbols.
- Maybe probably more things that I canāt recall right now.
And thatās just after a few hours of usage. I was making fun of the tiny issues in KDE before, but if I have to choose between that and this disaster then Iām probably going to switch to the KDE edition, if I cannot find solutions to all this. I really donāt understand how people can deal with it? Or am I somehow the only one?
What is your goal?
There are 3 main distributions
Almost everything else is downstream of those with a twist. For example
Stuff that isnāt downstream tends to have a highly specific purpose. Fedora started life as upstream RHEL, now it seems to be Red Hatās research plaything (e.g. immutable sounds cool, lets try it in Fedora).
My advice is go to one of the big 3, try them and only bother with one of the million down stream distributions if there is a Unique Selling Point for something you actually care about.
My goal is to have a functional desktop with good gaming capabilities.
EOS / Arch was that until it nuked itself, something that not even Manjaro managed to do, which, for all its bad reputation, had much less issues in a much longer time frame of use. Itās not really about having āthat extra 1 FPS in a gameā, but to ensure actual game compatibility, including for titles that arenāt 2 years old.
Try opensuse tumbleweed. It is a bit like arch(rolling release and such) but has more testing and less breakage. It has pretty good KDE support, a very good configuration tool and is one of the most secure distros in its base installation. Also good for gaming imho.
@FaeDrifter
Tried to install it on my old laptop for testing and the installer just gives me this warning before installing:
I really have no idea what it wants. I used the guided partitioning so I would expect it to handle that for me? Also, why do they not have a working live environment to test it before installation? Honestly not a great start.
Edit: Oof. So I just tried to install it on my desktop, first one failed tremendously and didnāt boot. Tried again and wiping the partitions proper instead of āon demandā of the garbage installer. Got a system, try to switch down to 1080p and it gives me this super stretched pancake resolution instead. Hell no.