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Anyone running Nobara who can answer these questions? (lemm.ee)
submitted 6 months ago by penquin@lemm.ee to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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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.

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[–] d3Xt3r 15 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

1. No
2. You'll need to delete your ~/.config, ~/.local, ~/.cache ( and maybe ~/.var, which is your Flatpak app data/cache). Might be best to rename your .config instead of outright deleting it, just in case you need to restore some old config.
3. It's been a while since I used Nobara, but IIRC it only creates the default @ and @home subvolumes.
4,5. Nobara should have Timeshift installed by default.

Honestly though, since you said that you want something that "just works" for gaming and coding, you should just get Bazzite. Bazzite is an immutable distro and everything is set up to work out-of-the-box. You never have to worry about broken updates again due to atomic updates and image rollbacks. You can directly boot from a previous image from GRUB (no need to restore it first), pin known good images to your GRUB, and even rollback to any previous image via the web (upto 90 days) - all with just a single command. And for coding, you can easily set up a Distrobox container to install all your tools and IDEs etc, it integrates well with the host OS so you won't even notice/care that it's inside a container.

[–] penquin@lemm.ee 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

I appreciate the detailed answer. I will doing a manual partitioning, will Nobara still create the subvolumes for me. I wanted to emphasize on that since I'm not sure. I'll take a look at Bazzite some time for sure. Also, create idea on renaming the .config folder. I do have so many things I do want to restart over on. Is that all? Will that remove all the traces of arch?

[–] d3Xt3r 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] penquin@lemm.ee 1 points 6 months 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

[–] prof@infosec.pub 3 points 6 months ago

Unfortunately I can't help you with Nobara, but I'm surprised you're having troubles with EndeavourOS.

EOS has been working out of the box for me for almost everything.

[–] boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net 3 points 6 months ago
  1. No, Nobara is a random remix of mutable/traditional Fedora. They even remove SELinux and replace it with Apparmor, which I can umderstand but assume is less secure. The better OS imho is bazzite.gg

On Bazzite/Atomic Fedora the base OS is already snapshotted on every update. I dont use multiple drives, but mounting them somewhere in /var like /var/home works

[–] Sunny@slrpnk.net 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I've been through the same distro as you've mentioned in your post. With my own various issues. I switched to Bazzite a few months ago and could t be happier. It's by far the easiest Linux distro I've used, everything is set to work out of the box and the system cannot be borked. Bazzite also a great community behind it and murliple talanted people pushing this to be the best optimized gaming distro.

While Nobara is great in its own ways, and GE being an absolute legend for his work. I personally don't see any upsides to using it over Bazzite if you're mainly going to be playing games.

Do yourself the favour and try this before trying Nobara, just my two cents.

[–] penquin@lemm.ee 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Bazzite won't work for me. I have 3 drives and I was told that those atomic updates/immutable distros don't like more than one drive. Nobara never wanted to install for me no matter how much I tried. There is a bug in their Calameres that is preventing grub from installing and I got sick of it and installed fedora. Then I got really stressed while I was hunting after apps. I've been spoiled by the AUR. So, I guess I'm going back to Endeavour OS for my own sanity.

[–] Grass@sh.itjust.works 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

no, one drive is Microsoft's thing that they keep bringing back each update that you have to remove again so you don't have a permanent notification.

joking aside though, what? I have 2 nvme, 1 sata ssd, and 5 spinning drives on bazzite.

edit: I see you mean the home directories on separate drives, which I have indeed not tested, nor have I used that setup in about a decade now so I dont know what issues could come up.

[–] penquin@lemm.ee 2 points 6 months ago

Yes, I have my home directory on a separate drive on its own