What is the Nobara Project?

This site is a work in progress.

The Nobara Project, to put it simply, is a modified version of Fedora Linux with user-friendly fixes added to it. Fedora is a very good workstation OS, however, anything involving any kind of 3rd party or proprietary packages is usually absent from a fresh install. A typical point and click user can often struggle with how to get a lot of things working beyond the basic browser and office documents that come with the OS without having to take extra time to search documentation. Some of the important things that are missing from Fedora, especially with regards to gaming include WINE dependencies, obs-studio, 3rd party codec packages such as those for gstreamer, 3rd party drivers such as NVIDIA drivers, and even small package fixes here and there.

This project aims to fix most of those issues and offer a better gaming, streaming, and content creation experience out of the box. More importantly, we want to be more point and click friendly, and avoid the basic user from having to open the terminal. It’s not that the terminal and/or terminal usage are a bad thing by any means, power users are more than welcome to continue with using the terminal, but for new users, point and click ease of use is usually expected.

It should be clarified that this distribution is -NOT- to be considered a ‘Fedora Spin’. A Fedora Spin is an official Fedora released version of a desktop environment (such as gnome/kde). We are a completely independent project from Fedora, and there are no Fedora developers or parties directly involved. We use Fedora packages, code, and repositories. That is the extent of it.

Currently, below is a list of fixes applied on top of Fedora:

Bug fixes and gaming-oriented updates:

General usage improvements:

  • Blender:

    – available with ffmpeg support (allows H264 render output)
    – available with HIP support for AMD GPU rendering

  • WINE:

    – included in installation.
    – Wine version provided by official WineHQ instead of Fedora — this allows for easier, more viable bug reporting due to some conflicts with how Fedora packages wine.
    – 64 and 32 bit WINE dependencies including winetricks and gstreamer installed for hassle-free out of the box Lutris + WINE gaming

  • Proton:

    – protonup-qt included in installation. (This is a GUI that can be used for installing Proton-GE and Wine-GE)

  • Nautilus (GNOME/Official file manager):

    – classic type-ahead functionality has been restored. This allows you to start typing to go to the file closest to the typed text within the folder instead of initiating a full system search.
    – button for toggling between breadcrumb navigation and a text navigation bar has been restored.
    – workaround added to fix not being able to drag+drop from file roller/ark to extract files as well as other file drag issues.

  • SELinux:

    – We have replaced SELinux with AppArmor (AppArmor is used in Ubuntu and OpenSUSE) as we find it to be more user-friendly, less intrusive, and easier to write policies for. You will still see some SELinux packages as they are required to keep Fedora compatibility and not break package dependencies.

  • RPMFusion:

    – Repos enabled by default

  • Steam:

    – included in installation.

  • Lutris:

    – included in installation, updated frequently

  • MangoHud + Goverlay + Gamescope:

    – included in installation, updated frequently

  • OnlyOffice:

    – included in installation as office suite

  • CUPS/printer drivers:

    – installed by default

  • Vapoursynth:

    – updated to latest version

About the inclusion of RPMFusion packages:

Per the following:
https://rpmfusion.org/FAQ#Free_repository

  1. Free repository

Software that uses a free license, but is not accepted in Fedora for various reasons.
Example: video players

  1. Nonfree repository

Software that uses a nonfree license, but is otherwise redistributable.
Example: Nvidia binary drivers

  1. Can I use RPM Fusion packages during the installation of Fedora?
    Yes, Anaconda (the Fedora installer) supports using external repositories during installation.
  2. Why doesn’t the Fedora project ship the Software that RPM Fusion offers?
    As Fedora is officially affiliated with Red Hat, Inc. in the Fedora Project, Fedora is effectively bound by the same legal restrictions as Red Hat, as a US company, is bound by. This means in particular that software encumbered with US patents cannot be included in Fedora.

    Fedora further only wants to ship software that is covered by Free and Open-Source-Software licenses; see Fedora’s Licensing Guidelines and its List of Good Licenses for details.

    Nobara is not associated with Red Hat or Fedora, and only includes the RPMFusion Free and Nonfree repositories, which as noted only contain packages which are legally re-distributable and/or contain free licensing.
  1. Does RPM Fusion distribute illegal software?
    No. RPM Fusion only distributes packages which can be legally re-distributed.

The nobara-appstream repository contains packages which would otherwise be available in RPMFusion Free or Nonfree repositories, but have been patched or modified by us:

blender
obs-studio
obs-studio-gstreamer-vaapi
mpv

The kickstart files and instructions for building the ISO yourself, should you decide you want to do so, can be found below:

https://gitlab.com/GloriousEggroll/nobara-images