So, after EndeavourOS’s GRUB comitted suicide, me being too stupid to understand chroot despite wiki “tutorials” 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 it’s been a long time I try it out, especially since you can have it in a more classic configuration those days again, even though I’d 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 “connected”, 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.
- “Files” is constantly crashing. Using the search? Crash. Going backwards? Crash. Try to do “something”? Crash. Do nothing? Probably also crash (hyperbolic).
- “Files” data transfer for copying & deleting files is slow as hell for whatever reason (on decent Samsung SSDs mind you).
- “Files” cannot multitask. If you’re copying, scanning, deleting or whatever, it won’t do anything else until that process is done.
- “Files” and other Gnome applications frequently bug out if you try too many things at once, freezing or crashing them.
- “Files”, or even Gnome as a whole, is so incredibly scrapped for features to achieve its simplistic look, that it lacks actual functionality.
- Gnome’s 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 VPN’s tray icon somehow turned into some three dots with a weird background.
- In the tray menu there’s 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 it’s 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 wasn’t 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 “OpenGL Renderer” application with it, taking up space on the task bar.
- Battle.net launcher can’t be maximized without constantly resetting or displaying information beneath the task bar.
- Can’t 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 can’t find anything, city or country, except some locations that aren’t near me.
- Can’t 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. Couldn’t 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. There’s a ‘German (US)’ one that’s close but it’s missing symbols.
- Maybe probably more things that I can’t recall right now.
And that’s 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 I’m probably going to switch to the KDE edition, if I cannot find solutions to all this. I really don’t understand how people can deal with it? Or am I somehow the only one?
Nobara being an independent side project based on Fedora and not a full-blown distro on its own - YMMV on all kinds of issues.
That said I’m running Nobara KDE on my desktop and everything has been working great. You should give it a try just to see how many of your issues are specific to Nobara gnome.
I’m aware it is not an official project, but I don’t think any of GE’s changes should affect much of the issues I am facing with it. And seeing this I will have an even harder time to recommend any sort of Gnome distro towards complete newbies trying to make the switch. Imagine this being their first experience with a Linux ecosystem.
Tried KDE Nobara after OpenSUSE and oh boy…
First Dolphin just crashed, always. Trying to report this caused even the crash handler to crash. Apparently there’s a bug with encrypted setups and you have to manually create the thumbnail folder to fix this. No idea why this is not patched yet. Or maybe it is, but I can’t further update the system anymore because of all packages throwing GPG errors now. This is all cursed to hell.