Gaming Linux Nobara 42: Move to Fedora 42 base and Brave browser

Version 42 of the Linux distribution Nobara, developed for gamers and content creators, has been released. The changes remain straightforward: at its core, the base updates to the fresh Fedora 42 packages. The standard browser has been replaced by Brave.

The Nobara maintainers summarize the changes in the version announcement. The default browser is now Brave, with the Nobara makers disabling many of the interesting features by default, such as anonymization with Tor. Brave was not the first choice, but remained the only browser after tests. Firefox and its derivatives caused GPU crashes when scrolling through live videos with variable frame rate (VFR) enabled. Chromium and Vivaldi did not work with Google Meets when hardware acceleration was enabled, although it worked with the flatpaks. Brave worked stably and did not require any additional packages for video playback. Apart from the standard configuration, the Nobara maintainers did not make any changes to Brave.

Nobara: Small changes

The Nobara package manager is no longer pinned to the desktop and in the favorites. This is to prevent inexperienced users from fiddling with system packages that they are not familiar with. The maintainers have developed their own tool, Flatpost, for Flatpak management. It replaces "plasma-discover" and "gnome-software". Although the Nobara developers only officially support Gnome and KDE, it should run on any desktop environment.

The statement that Nobara 42 is now to be a rolling release is somewhat confusing. This actually means that the automatic distribution upgrade from Nobara 41 to 42 is running. Rolling release generally means that packages are offered for update as soon as an update is available.

Changes for players

The Nobara maintainers have equipped the Mesa version supplied with additional corrections for "wine wayland" and "DOOM: The Dark Ages". They have also updated the driver manager. It now allows you to easily switch between "mesa-vulkan-drivers" and "mesa-vulkan-drivers-git". It can also switch between open and closed source versions of the Nvidia drivers, regardless of the development branch.

The maintainers have also updated other core components: Gnome 48 is included, KDE at version 6.3.4. The Mesa libraries come in version 25.1.0, the Nvidia driver as standard in the form of "Production" 570.144. Finally, the kernel is at version 6.14.6. The latest ISO images are available for download on the Nobara download page.

In January, the Nobara makers released version 41 of the Linux distribution. They had brought it up to the level of Fedora 41 and also made many small optimizations.

(dmk)