A new release of the Nobara 42 distribution has been published, based on the Fedora Linux 42 package base and including additional fixes to address issues with launching computer games, streaming, and content creation tasks. Nine installation images are prepared for download: the official one featuring a styled KDE, additional images with clean GNOME and KDE environments, Steam-HTPC for Steam Deck based on KDE, and Steam-Handheld for portable devices, along with separate builds of the first four images with proprietary NVIDIA drivers.
The aim of the project is to provide a ready-to-use user environment that requires no additional actions after installation and addresses the main issues users face with Fedora. The distribution comes with proprietary components typically used on workstations, such as multimedia codecs and drivers, as well as packages that are missing from the official Fedora repository, such as OBS Studio, Steam, Lutris, and additional dependencies for Wine.
Among the advanced fixes offered by the distribution are the provision of patches to the Linux kernel to reduce gaming latency (Zenify), solutions for OpenRGB issues, use of the amdgpu driver with older GPUs, support for the Steam Deck console and Microsoft Surface device, improved compatibility with ASUS laptops, elimination of SimpleDRM incompatibility with NVIDIA drivers, support for Lenovo Legion laptops, inclusion of ashmem and binder for Waydroid, and resolution of issues when using Wayland with the Nouveau driver.
The package includes the latest releases of Mesa and Wine, built from the core projects' repositories. SELinux has been replaced with AppArmor. Patches have been added for Glibc, Flatpak, SDL2, Mutter, and xwayland. The Blender package includes support for FFmpeg and the HIP ray tracing library. Additional dependencies for Davinci Resolve have been installed. A large set of patches for OBS Studio has been included, among which are patches to resolve issues with game screen capturing using OpenGL and Vulkan, as well as patches for hardware encoding of H.264 and H.265/HEVC on AMD, NVIDIA, and Intel systems. The RPMFusion repository is activated by default.
In the new version:
- Transition to the Fedora 42 package base.
- The distribution has switched to a rolling model for delivering updates. For example, users of existing Nobara 41 systems have already received all packages corresponding to the Nobara 42 release through updates.
- The Brave browser is set as the default with configured settings for "BraveRewardsDisabled", "BraveWalletDisabled", "BraveVPNDisabled", "TorDisabled", "DnsOverHttpsMode", and disabled AI chat. The switch to Brave was prompted by issues with scrolling through YouTube shorts and TikTok in Firefox, as well as problems with Google Meets in Chromium with hardware acceleration enabled. Brave does not have these issues and does not require additional packages to enable video codecs.
- The shortcut for launching the Nobara Package Manager has been removed from the favorites list and the desktop. The package manager remains in the system but is not recommended for beginners who may struggle to understand how to install system packages.
- Instead of plasma-discover and gnome-software for installing flatpak packages, a custom developed interface called flatpost is offered.
- The Mesa package has been rebuilt with patches to fix issues with wine wayland and the game "DOOM: The Dark Ages."
- A new driver manager has been introduced, allowing users to switch between the mesa-vulkan-drivers and mesa-vulkan-drivers-git branches, as well as choose different versions of open and closed NVIDIA drivers.
- Updated package versions: GNOME 48, KDE 6.3.4, Mesa 25.1.0, NVIDIA 570.144, Linux kernel 6.14.6.
Source: opennet.ru
