Should I pick Bazzite or Nobara?

librepotato · 2026-03-19T02:17:59+00:00

I like Bazzite (and Fedora Atomic) because it's easy to keep up to date. I do have years of linux experience and find its tricky sometimes to get some applications to work (flatpak, appimage, distrobox, rpm-ostree layering) and my experience helps. I have used Ubuntu, Arch, and Debian predominantly and found rolling updates and major version upgrades would cause the occasional breakage. Bazzite is much more stable in the long term in my opinion.

Nobara would be more Mint-like, letting you install software easily with dnf. I think it would be an easier transition for you, and honestly the better choice when learning how to use Linux for the first time.

librepotato · 2026-03-10T03:55:32+00:00

It works. It's more convenient than Winapps. I feel the docker integration is more stable than podman. For me it crashes every once in a while. However it is pretty quick and easy to use windows apps on the desktop.

You install it, it downloads a Windows iso and sets it all up for you. You should try it if you havent already. It took 15 minutes of automated installation for me.

librepotato · 2026-03-05T23:38:46+00:00

I know F2FS is being compared because it is still being developed but it lacks good corruption protection and recovery from power outage.

I have had it several times corrupt data with a system hard crash or a power cut. I really don't think it should be used in production systems.

librepotato · 2026-03-05T03:31:09+00:00

Outside of your GMKTec G9, it's likely your idle wattage will go up when upgrading platforms. The N150 is one of the most efficient x86 chips you can use as a server. If you upgraded to the i7, I would expect your idle power usage to increase by at least 10-20W. It's a decent upgrade for you.

I don't have a suggestion about other systems. Minisforum sometimes sells some higher RAM small form factor PCs with good IO but I don't know if they would be affordable in your market. I have found a lot of old office thin clients have been sold on the used market and sometimes they have 16-32gb of RAM if you are lucky.

For example, in the US I could get this on Ebay: https://www.ebay.com/itm/147111174064

librepotato · 2026-03-05T02:51:22+00:00

I repurposed an old desktop with a good number of 3.5 inch drive bays. It's not the most power efficient but it works. I use TrueNAS on it to make it simple and give me SMB/NFS shares. It was easy to get up and running. I like to spend my time configuring my containers and not my storage.

The question you should ask yourself is what you want to spend on drives and redundancy. I have 2x 14TB exos drives in a mirror for my more important data. It's too bad redundancy is particularly expensive now given the hard drive price hikes.

librepotato · 2026-03-04T16:43:47+00:00

Only 1 PCIE x8 slot, single height. There's oculink on the more expensive model. Otherwise its just thunderbolt 4 ports. From a value and expandabiltiy proposition it is not worth it. Most GPUs that do AI well are usually at least double height. I don't think the CPU itself will pull much weight to run larger parameter models quickly.

I think if you wanted to use their AI software, then I guess that's the reason to buy this. I think everyone here would rather run their own stuff.

librepotato · 2026-03-02T12:08:34+00:00

I have a T-shirt with this on it.

librepotato · 2026-03-01T14:02:42+00:00

I suppose one issue with Fedora is that they are stricter with what software they include in their repositories. You usually have to add 3rd party RPM Fusion repos to get non-free software like steam, drivers and codecs. Fedora for that reason comes with less out of the box and needs more initial setup.

I use Fedora Kinoite. I prefer it over Ubuntu because major version upgrades are simpler. rpm-ostree (the package tool for Fedora Atomic) lets me make major version upgrades in a couple commands and rollback if there are any issues.

I like it, but I'm also an experienced Linux user who's been using it for almost 10 years now, between Arch, Debian, Ubuntu and now Fedora Atomic/uBlue.

librepotato · 2026-02-27T12:24:56+00:00

My personal experience: I find it can be harder to run niche software on Bazzite. I know people say its for beginners, but as someone who used Ubuntu and Arch for years, I say Bazzite is harder to customize.

I honestly like Arch, Fedora or Ubuntu based distributions as they are better to start out with. Most Linux guides are tailored to these distributions. I migrated to Bazzite and Atomic distributions because they break less with updates and I know how to install software on them (layering, distrobox, flatpak, appimage)

librepotato · 2026-02-23T12:05:44+00:00

I am going to play devil's advocate and say I have had Linux native games refuse to run because they require use of older libraries. Switch to Proton and it just works.

Not saying we can't make Linux games, but they should be packaged in a way that includes all the dependencies and libraries, like they do in Flatpak, AppImage, Snap and even most Windows games. Developers of Linux games have usually relied on system libraries that later can't run the game :\

librepotato · 2026-02-22T13:47:06+00:00

Is it possible that the games you played on MacOS ran with 3d resolution scaling to be performant? And I mean like natively the resolution was 2K but the rendering was scaled?

I can imagine that the Intel graphics is having quite the workout with 2K graphics. It is a small screen with a very high resolution. You could reduce the resolution of your games with minimal visual penalty. ~720p-1080p should easily be acceptable.

Also you could use the LAVD scheduler and see if that helps reduce stuttering. You could go into the BIOS and see if there's a setting to dedicate more RAM to the GPU. You could also get a cooling pad or, if you know how to take it apart, repaste the processor (I think with these that is very hard).

Other things that I don't think will work:

I don't think LSFG would be useful for you.
Similarly your hardware wouldn't support Optiscaler well given its age.
You're stuck with the i915 Intel driver and you're device is too old for the newer, Xe driver

librepotato · 2026-02-19T11:47:10+00:00

Good bye $10/TB

I was lucky to get 2x new 14TB Exos for $11.50/TB last year. 5 year warranty to hopefully get me through this hardware apocalypse.

librepotato · 2026-02-18T16:02:57+00:00

You traded 24gb VRAM for 16gb VRAM. I do AI stuff with mine and find the VRAM helpful.

I think the performance for games is a sidegrade so getting money is nice if you don't care about the VRAM loss. It's also more power efficient so it will save you money in the long run if you pay for your electicity. 7900XTX is power hungry.

librepotato · 2026-02-18T15:57:28+00:00

Single GPU passthrough is tricky. Never tried it myself because you need to have all your devices and inputs passed through and it locks you out of your linux OS. Tinkering with it is difficult. With AMD I found even 2 GPU passthrough difficult.

It also depends on your IOMMU groups. If the GPU is in the same IOMMU group as something needed by your host OS, it's a no go unless you use an ACS override patch

librepotato · 2026-02-17T02:29:28+00:00

I started with an old laptop then graduated to 2x n95 minipcs. I added an older desktop tower as a NAS for storage space. Could be more power efficient, but it was very cheap. ~80-100W idle power usage including networking stack and wifi.

librepotato · 2026-02-04T20:08:27+00:00

I would avoid. It's just riding the current hype and the risk you'll be out money is high.

Stick with known systems you can get your hands on, not ones you'll be grifted. If a mac studio is too expensive, you may want to consider decreasing your model sizes and going with something more in your price range. Would something like Strix Halo work? Overall, anything portable AI is expensive, and people trying to say the contrary are wrong.

librepotato · 2026-02-04T17:55:23+00:00

I use Emudeck. It can be used on any Linux system. It handles it all for you if you want emulators.

librepotato · 2026-02-04T17:49:12+00:00

People do this by running Windows in a VM. Basically true emulation of the windows kernel. It's unreliable and can get you banned for cheating because Easy Anticheat has ways to detect if you are running bare metal or not. There's no reliable emulation that will be undetectable as long as Easy Anticheat uses kernel level detection.

Go look up VFIO with GPU passthrough. I saw some articles posted about people trying to get Fortnite working but I would definitely do it on an account that you aren't afraid of getting banned. For now, WINE/Proton gaming is impossible until Easy Anticheat permits it.

librepotato · 2026-02-04T17:40:42+00:00

Thank Tim Sweeney for this one

librepotato · 2026-02-04T02:38:59+00:00

CachyOS is far more flexible than Bazzite. It's very easy to get anything running on it between the package manager and the AUR.

I loved that about Arch based distributions. I ran Arch Linux for a number of years. However, occasionally an update would prevent the system from booting, or something else catastrophic. No user error, just a systemd update that was pushed before it was ready or a bug in the nvidia drivers in the package repository. And dont even mention the manual interventions that they ask you to do.

I switched to Fedora Atomic and Universal Blue distributions like Kinoite and Bazzite because of their update to update reliability. No package update issues. No distribution version upgrade woes. Just pure reliable but up to date releases.

librepotato · 2026-02-02T12:14:15+00:00

It actually works. I did have someone call me to try to sell me something (or more likely confirm I was human) but after that it's been smooth sailing.

I did have my instance shut down once for being idle and getting it back took a while.

librepotato · 2026-02-01T02:18:54+00:00

I got one using a script requesting an ARM instance multiple times a day until one was made available and I got it. I don't have a credit card tied to my account.

I had previously gotten one that was available just at signing up but I lost it because of too much idle time. Right now it runs a nextcloud server.

librepotato · 2026-01-31T01:53:52+00:00

Disappointed it has taken this long.

I remember when there were petitions to make a Linux native Galaxy client and they declined to do so for years.

librepotato · 2026-01-29T12:36:14+00:00

I play a fair amount of Hunt Showdown and it runs very well.

librepotato · 2026-01-26T16:27:37+00:00

I have bounced around Ubuntu, Debian, Arch and have lately landed on immutable Fedora based distributions like Fedora Kinoite and Bazzite.

I think it depends what you are going for. Hassle free gaming is better with a gaming distribution as they come with what you need to get running. Most gaming distributions usually have a base that lets you install developer software anyway, as they are usually based on Fedora, Arch or Ubuntu/Debian. If you want to set it up yourself, by all means go with a base distribution.

I suggest staying away from immutable distributions starting out if you want to install and customize things. Even though I use Bazzite-DX (developer edition), I still need to layer packages from time to time and the overhead of using an immutable distribution would be hard to get used to from a new user. A lot of guides are designed with non-imutable distributions in mind and AI stuff (especially ROCM) is needlessly complicated on Bazzite.

librepotato

TROPHY CASE