cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/32128978

Switching from Endeavour OS to Nobara

Hi all, I’ve been having issues with my favorite games on EndeavourOS Linux. Also, on top of that, an update the other day deleted my whole plasma desktop and left me with a skeleton of SDDM. I got it fixed, but some things are still wonky. I’m honestly getting tired of maintaining it and I just want something that just works for my video games and some coding. Nobara sounded awesome after some research. I do have a couple of questions for you all before switching:

  1. Is Nobara atomic? Immutable? Or whatever those distros are called.

  2. I have my /root, /home separate each in their own drive, plus a 3rd one for my steam and other games. Since I’m coming from Arch and I’ll only be formatting my root drive, what folders/files will I need to remove from my /home directory after switching to Nobara so I don’t have issues?

  3. Since I separate drives for everything, I’ll be doing a manual partitioning when I install Nobara, and will be choosing btrfs for my /root so I can do snapshots with timeshift. My question is, does Nobara set up the subvolumes automatically for me when I do manual partitioning, or do I need to set them up myself?

  4. How hard is it to set up snapshots in grub?

  5. Or does Nobara have a back up tool already that already does snapshots?

Thank you.

  • @d3Xt3rM
    1•1 month ago

    Is that all? Will that remove all the traces of arch?

    There will be some other minor dot files in your /home which you might want to review, like .bashrc, .bash_profile, .profile etc. These should be mostly harmless, but if you don’t recall customising them, then yeah free to nuke all the dot files. Also be aware that some programs also leave their configs outside the .config folder, like Firefox might have a .mozilla folder, GTK programs might create a .themes folder, vim has .vim. So you might want to review and delete these as well, if you want a clean config.

    As for the last step - just before you boot into your new distro, you might to get rid of the Arch/Endeavour entries from your ESP/UEFI. Run efibootmgr to see your current UEFI boot entries, then nuke the entries using efibootmgr --delete-bootnum -b #.

    And to get rid of the GRUB configs, delete your <ESP>/EFI/grub folder. I’m guessing your /boot is on your root partition? If not then you’ll also need to delete /boot/grub.

    Now when you install your next distro, you should get a nice and clean GRUB install.

    • @[email protected]OP
      1•1 month ago

      Nobara is not installing on EFI, it only wants bios. It takes me to a grub rescue menu after I install and reboot. Installed on bios and followed the same steps I did on efi and it booted just fine. On bios, Calameres gives me an option to choose where to install grub, but it doesn’t have that option on efi. So I’m now having to install on non efi