I'm Back to Appreciating Fedora and Its Forks #Linux #Fedora #Nobara #Shorts

This article is a transcript of a video that you can watch by clicking the thumbnail below. Hence, certain statements may not make sense in this text form, and watching the video instead is recommended.

Transcript

After exclusively using Void Linux with an almost purely keyboard-driven interface for several years now, my curiosity got the better of me. While upgrading the storage drives on several of my ThinkPads recently, I deliberately left some unused space on some of them, just for this reason. And yes, VMs don't do justice in giving you a feel of an operating system, especially when you're dealing with hardware peculiarities. And hence, I decided to revisit Nobara on this T14 Gen 1. I chose the Gnome edition as even though most of our brains like my own are tuned for desktop environments like KDE, I've had a great experience with Gnome back in the day.

Now this isn’t a distro review, nor a window manager review, but I just wanted to take a couple of minutes to appreciate how far we’ve come with mainstream Linux desktop environments.

Now, it been been a while since I used Fedora or one of its forks as a daily driver, but after all these years, my understanding of how one Linux distribution is different than the other had changed significantly. To me, at a high level, it's only the release type, package manager and package versioning philosophy, init system, initramfs type, the default graphical stack including the desktop environment or window manager, display server, display manager, and probably theming make them stand out from the competition. Here, you have a point release, dnf as the package manager with Flatpak for the rest, initcpio for initramfs, a lot of modern Linux stuff that Fedora is known to be one of the earliest adopters for, along with several tweaks to make Nobara what it is.

Let's not talk about more technical features for a moment, and just appreciate how smooth these trackpad gestures have become. Back when I left macOS to resume back to Linux, I wouldn't have thought I'd say this. Now I did also run some comparison between Fedora and Nobara, and one thing I found Nobara did better right out of the box was to run a 4K TV in full resolution instead of 1080p from this ThinkCentre M715q.

Also, my personal complain with Nobara around not booting right after a fresh installation was also self-imposed. Even when asked to use the entire disk during the installation, it still considers using another EFI volume and if that one doesn't pass its criteria, it silently skips installing a bootloader. Anyway, now I know.

One other thing I briefly mentioned in my previous video was my curiosity around whether Nobara handles hybrid graphics as well as Pop!_OS does. I'm sad to say that it unfortunately does'nt, performing similarly like Bazzite more or less.

I guess not all operating systems are the best for all hardware, because I will have to stick with Pop!_OS for gaming on my T15g Gen 2.