From the perspective of a Gamer and long-time (but casual) Linux User

FYI, this post is pretty long and verbose. TL;DR: NOBARA GOOD, WINDOWS BAD, NVIDIA ANNOYING.

Despite using Linux casually for a long time on a variety of devices, I have never taken the plunge in fully converting to Linux on my desktop. As much as I’d like to continue using Windows 10 for years to come, I’ve grown tired of Microsoft. I used to love using my computer and I’ve always had a fondness for Windows. My first real experiences with a computer were with Windows XP and Windows 7. Now that Microsoft is so hellbent on making the Windows experience as horrible as possible, shoving AI and telemetry into every corner of their OS ad nauseum, I feel I need to move on.

I had a spare SSD lying around and the desire to get rid of the Windows 11 upgrade prompts, so I decided to let it rip. I went ahead and put the 256GB drive into the second NVME slot in my desktop and then set up Nobara Linux on it. I put my desktop together back in 2020 using parts I was only able to obtain back then by being an incredibly lucky retail worker. The “Monolith” is powered by a i7-10700KF, 32GB DDR4 RAM and a Nvidia GeForce 3060ti. I have two drives installed in it already, a 1TB NVME for Windows 10 (and some games that need to be on an SSD) and a 4TB mechanical drive for mass storage and my Steam library.

December 27, 2025 - The First Day

The installation for Nobara went smoothly. There were some minor issues (such as the Nvidia ISO I downloaded not including Wi-Fi drivers for some reason), but nothing showstopping.

I sped through basic configuration almost immediately booted up Steam. I was able to point Steam to my NTFS game drive and most of my library was picked up, but this wasn’t perfect. In addition to verifying each game (over 100 of them total), Steam started downloading compatibility updates en masse, hogging up the drive. I was able to update and play Doom Eternal (which ran great by the way), but once I tried playing something else, I started running into some serious glitches with the Steam desktop app freezing or hanging whenever accessing data on the NTFS game drive. The Linux implementation of NTFS is reportedly buggy when shared with Windows 10, so I ended up having to force a reboot after the computer decided it didn’t want to eject or otherwise mess with the NTFS drive. I wasn’t able to do a ton more with gaming or fiddling with Steam, but I am at least considering getting an additional drive to replace my current game drive with, just to prevent the loss of ~3TB of data and to also clean house.

Nobara seems to be a good implementation of Fedora, but it does things differently than I am used to. I opted to use KDE since it is the desktop environment I am most familiar with. On most installations of KDE I have tried, I’ve been able to use KDE’s “Discover” app to discover and install any variety of applications in combination with the Terminal to effectively install whatever I needed. Nobara does not include Discover due to potential system breakages if you allow the program to update your system and instead includes a semi desktop-agnostic Flatpak discovery application called “Flatpost”. Flatpost is fine and works well, but has its own quirks I had to get used to after using Discover for so long. In addition to Flatpost is another RPM package GUI and a command I have yet to use, nobara-sync cli.

A peculiarity I noticed was that despite Nobara being a KDE focused distribution, a lot of the tools Glorious Eggroll bundles with the OS are GTK. This isn’t a bad thing, it just surprised me to see a lot of the applications open with Gnome style application windows instead of KDE native ones. For an extremely anal person such as myself, this also irked me just due to the inconsistencies of the global themes, but for most users this won’t be even close to an actual issue. KDE is notorious by now for the many many different options you’ll have to change your theme across multiple graphical interfaces (KDE, GTK, Kvantum, QT, etc., etc.) so it’s hardly an issue unique to Nobara.

One of the first “big” issues I discovered was when I tried to put my computer to sleep. This, again, is hardly a fault of Nobara but more with how Linux and some desktops handle sleep states. I found that by default the computer would darken the screens, but not turn them off. The fans and my singular RGB strip would remain on. The default suspend method was s2idle, which is considered “Shallow Deep” sleep and apparently just not liked by my motherboard. I instead changed it to deep which managed to sleep the computer, peripherals, fans and RGB completely as it did under Windows 10. I was able to make a quick edit of the GRUB kernel parameter options that made this persist across reboots (mem_sleep_default=deep).

Next thing I ran into was bringing my Firefox profile over. This is not at all related to Nobara, but the “migration” process is something I think is important to talk about. For years I have been annoying locked out of my Firefox “Account”, but still somehow syncing to it under Windows 10. To get around this and sync things myself, I’ve used a combination of Bitwarden and xBrowserSync with varying degrees of success. By some twist of fate, Firefox added additional security methods to their account system, so I was finally able to rid myself of the unknown password and unknown MFA methods I set up many years ago. After logging into my account, I was pleased to see all of my extensions and bookmarks come over quickly. I have ditched saving my passwords specifically within the browser, so I allowed Bitwarden to do it’s job in handling those.

With the browser set up, I began fetching and installing the rest of my “must have” applications. Nobara already included LibreOffice, so I didn’t have to do anything there. I installed Goofcord as my Discord client and then tried to get OrcaSlicer for my 3D Printer, only to find that the OrcaSlicer flatpak package has yet to make it to the standard Flatpack repo. I downloaded the available .flatpack file from OrcaSlicer’s Github and double clicked on it, expecting it to start an install, but nothing happened. Flatpost doesn’t seem to be usable for installing standalone .flatpack or .flatpakref files, or if it does, I couldn’t find a way to do it. I went ahead and installed the file via the Terminal and opened everything up, but weirdly enough I couldn’t get the main window to render anything. I could go through the entire printer setup and load a 3D print model, but I just got a gray screen of nothingness. I opened Flatpost and modified the global flatpak settings to make sure OrcaSlicer was able to use hardware acceleration, but that didn’t do anything. I rebooted my PC and weirdly started to get a persistent Flatpak update notification. I ran system update multiple times and it kept finding the same update file repeatedly for some unknown reason, so I just removed the OrcaSlicer package entirely. I then tried the AppImage version, which worked significantly better than the Flatpak version. I assumed AppImages would be somehow installable, but that’s not the case (I haven’t personally dealt with them much, so again, not a Nobara specific issue as much as it was just something I noticed). I was able to “install” the AppImage after using a different standalone utility called “AppImageLauncher”. Most things seem to be working with OrcaSlicer now, but it does seem to crash if I try to load up the webcam view from my BambuLab A1 that it’s hooked up to over LAN mode.

For the first day of the switch, definitely some little things here and there but nothing show-stopping. I am a tinkerer and I don’t dislike having to fiddle with things a bit to get everything working perfectly the way I want it. I don’t think there’s anything inherently “bad” about Nobara that I have collided with as of yet, but the switch might yield some more oddities the more I use the PC.

December 28-30, 2025

I haven’t had a ton of time to use my desktop the past few days as we have a guest staying with us over Christmas and New Year. The brief things I have used the PC for have been positive though. The sleep issue is mostly resolved now and I can safely put the computer to sleep and wake it without any issues. All of my peripherals appear to be working well and general browsing via Firefox and chatting with Discord seems to be working identical to how it was on Windows, now with the added benefit that I am not being sucked dry of telemetry.

The biggest thing I still need to figure out is Steam and my existing NTFS drive. I tried to update and play a few games off my drive (Control, Returnal, Monster Hunter World) and none of them would update or launch with Steam reporting read/write errors. This worried me me mostly because my game drive is pretty old and has lasted me through three separate iterations of my desktop. There’s a TON of junk on there, and while it’s nothing absolutely critical, it would be a pain to lose everything on the drive.

Last night (the 30th) I took some time to boot back into Windows and scan the 4TB NTFS drive to see if there were any potential errors with it. To my surprise, I saw Steam erroring out when trying to read/write to it under Windows as well. I was able to browse the folders on the drive and most files seem to be fine, it’s mostly just Steam games I am struggling with. I scanned, repaired, and even de-fragmented the drive to see if that would help. I noticed a few LOST.00X folders showing up on the root of the drive that might be from some sort of repair or corruption, so at this point I am considering just replacing the drive. After doing some thorough spring cleaning, uninstalling games I hadn’t played in the past 4-5 years, I recovered a lot of space. There’s still about 1.25TB being used (still need to clean the non-Steam directories) but after a scan and defragmentation, things appear to be running better in both Linux and Windows 10.

January 1, 2026

New year, new me, meaning GOOD BYE to Windows 10 and HELLO to Linux only, right? Right.

After all of the cleanup on my NTFS drive the other day, I tried updating and playing a few games off the drive under Nobara and luckily didn’t have any issues. I was able to play some more intensive titles after updating and verifying the games. I still plan on replacing or at least adding a “Linux only” steam drive that is in a more friendly format, but for now I think things are running at least a bit better than before. Again, all of these NFTS issues aren’t unique to Nobara at all, it’s a known thing with Linux and something I was aware I’d run into before even starting this whole thing.

I had previously thought that all of my sleep issues were completely resolved, but unfortunately they came back to an extent. While my desktop is going into the proper sleep state, I was experiencing pretty annoying, random crashes to Plasma whenever I woke the PC from sleep. After doing some online research, I saw some discussion about Nvidia driver issues under Linux (surprise surprise) that happen when the GPU isn’t saving the session to VRAM.

I had to enable a kernel parameter that would allow for “persistent VRAM after suspend”. I found instructions for this on both Reddit and the Arch Wiki. I have yet to run into the issue again so I am optimistic this fixed it, but not 100% certain. It’s interesting to see the Arch Wiki discuss these changes as if they were made by default with the Arch version of the Nvidia drivers whereas I am having to enable services and make the changes under Nobara. Of course, no one said Nobara was going to be perfect, but I wasn’t expecting Arch Linux to seemingly have more Nvidia driver pre-configurations made.

It’s worth mentioning that I did consider installing either Garuda Linux or CachyOS as both are quite popular along with Nobara. The main reason I went with Nobara instead though was a fear that using an Arch based distribution would mean constant updates and potential random system breakages. I wanted to use something more “stable” because this is my main PC. I didn’t want to worry about issues randomly causing a scenario where I would be unable to game or use my PC for it’s normal tasks, so I chose Nobara thinking the Fedora base would mean heightened reliability. I’ll have to use the PC more and see long term whether or not stability under Nobara becomes an issue, but in the few days I’ve been using the PC for normal tasks, I have only had to update once or twice. I recall my Arch Linux laptop would update sometimes multiple times in a single day, which was something I wanted to avoid if at all possible.

January 2-5, 2026

I haven’t been keeping this log up-to-date the past few days, but I am running into more issues.

I did ultimately decide to procure a new Linux-only game drive. I set a 2TB WD Black drive up with exfat4 and started moving some games from the NTFS drive onto it. I have also flagged it as the “Default” Steam library on my system so I can hopefully force the shader cache to pile up there only. I moved a few titles, mostly smaller items, onto the new drive. Once the games were moved, verified, and updated I didn’t run into any problems playing some simpler stuff. I did move a larger game, or rather the demo for Stellar Blade to try out, but again, I didn’t have any issues after verifying files and allowing things to update.

I am slowly going through the NTFS drive library and removing games I don’t need or haven’t played. Digital hoarding is a serious thing, folks. Most titles I had downloaded I hadn’t played more than once, but they were still hogging up gig upon gig of space. I don’t need to do all of that now.

A huge HUGE folder on my old NTFS drive is titled “Junk”, and it is a place where pretty much every project I work on goes to die. A lot of my 3D printer files are here, along with hundreds of gigs of retro ROMs, Linux ISOs, VMs, and random applications. There is also a “Games” folder with small indie titles I got from Humble Bundle, GOG and Itch.io that I don’t need to worry about right now either.

All of this to say, heavy spring cleaning is now under way. I am trying to focus on what I actually use and not on the stuff I think I’ll need to access. A lot of stuff, unsurprisingly, is not something I need to keep. I also keep reminding myself that I have ~30TB of storage on my server, plenty to store junk there instead.

Unfortunately I am still experiencing the plasma shell crashing issues from before. The PC goes to sleep normally and wakes 99.9% of the time, but Plasma still randomly crashes when the PC wakes from sleep. I also noticed a bizarre issue where Plasma will resume on my 1440p displayport monitor, but only at 640x480 resolution. It shows the monitor as some sort of generic Nvidia display adapter and doesn’t allow me to change the resolution. I’m able to just turn the monitor off and on again and that fixes it, but it’s odd. I don’t know if the plasmashell crashes and resolution quirks are related, but they’re frequent enough to be annoying. I am also not too sure the changes I made previously with enabling a few Nvidia related services and adjusting kernel parameters helped. On one hand, the crashes seem less frequent, but on the other they do still happen. I tried to make heads or tails of Plasma’s crash reporter, but trying to generate a crash report didn’t work (or said that it generated non-human-readable information).

More recently, I have been seeing a ton of articles and YouTube videos about CachyOS. One of my friends even asked me over Discord if it was the distro I was using since I had mentioned switching over. I can’t lie, I am experiencing this weird pseudo-fomo with my choice to use Nobara since it isn’t “the hotness” of the moment. I guess the influx of new Linux users must be coming from people challenging themselves to ditch Windows for their New Years resolutions? Either way, the hype surrounding CachyOS is noticeable. That said, I want to refrain from distro-hopping on my main desktop. That’s what I have… five… laptops for, after all. I am stubborn in my decision not to use a rolling, bleeding-edge distribution based on Arch for my main machine. Immediate, frequent fixes are a nice value proposition, but the possibility to break something from an update still scares me.

A week for the books?

Scrolling through this… I think I have written enough for now. It has been a little over a week now since beginning the migration onto Linux fulltime and I don’t regret anything yet. I’ve been able to clean things up and focus my desktop experience a bit, which is something that was long overdue. I still want to clean things up more with my drives and figure out the random Plasma shell crashes I am still running into, but the overall desktop and gaming experience under Nobara has been pretty great. I like Nobara, and for pretty much every small little gripe I’ve had, there’s been a way to tweak things exactly how I want them. The absence of random, garbage tasks hogging system resources is also lovely, as is the lack of any telemetry garbage happening in the background. My PC finally feels like my PC again, which is a great thing.

I don’t know if I’ll do any status updates beyond this post, but I may update things occasionally or if something significant happens. Here’s hoping 2026 truly is the year of the Linux Desktop!

~ tiduscrying 2025-01-06