 There have been gaming distros for a very long time. Pretty much ever since gaming has been a thing on Linux people have been trying to make distros that are really good for gaming and most of them have been varying levels of meh, really because they don't do a ton of stuff that really actually make gaming better. Usually they install Steam and then call themselves a gaming distro. It's kind of like all those keyboards that you see on Amazon that say gaming keyboard. When really all they've done is add some RGB. It doesn't really make you better at call duty. So when I saw a new gaming distro called Nubara, I was understandably a little bit skeptical because it's called itself a gaming distro and really what is a gaming distro, right? But despite all that I decided I was going to take a look at it. So today I installed it on hardware and I've been messing around with it now for two or three hours. So today we're going to be taking a first look at Nubara. Now before we get jumping into this we should say Nubara is based on Fedora. Fedora 36 to be exact and basically what they've done is they've taken Fedora workstation and they've made it better. I just say better because they've added a lot of stuff to it that really does make it just a smidge better than the default Fedora ISO and the things that they've done really do play a role in making the gaming experience better. So let's go ahead and take a look at Nubara. Now the installation which I don't actually have any b-roll to show you of because it's really just like installing Fedora. It uses the Anaconda installer and the process is basically the same as any other Anaconda installer has ever been. So I didn't record that part but it lasted maybe five minutes or so. It installed pretty quickly and other than that it was flawless in terms of installing. Once you have it installed you're going to see a desktop that looks like this here and as you can tell this uses the GNOME desktop environment and they've done a ton of stuff to make it look different than vanilla GNOME. So they've installed a ton of extensions so I'll show you this first. If you go into the applications here and then accessories and then the extension manager, now that comes installed by default, you'll see that there are a bunch of installed extensions here for you to mess around with. Things like the applications menu, things like ARC menu, background logo, blur my shell, a dash to panel. The pop shell is here down here at the bottom enabled so you can turn on tiling if you want to. Icons on the desktop is here just extension after extension is either installed and enabled or just at least installed and it's definitely a lot more extensions than you'll see on vanilla GNOME. So they've done a quite a bit here to tweak it to make it so that it's actually usable by people out of the box. Now let's talk a little bit about their goals here. So basically what they want to do is take Fedora and make it so that there are several user friendly fixes that enable people to use it for gaming a little bit better. So they've added things like the Nvidia drivers, third party codec packages, OBS studio, wine dependencies, things like that. And a lot of times when you see a quote unquote gaming distro, they'll go really crazy in terms of installed software. So they'll install everything under the sun, even if don't really need it. Nabara hasn't done that. So if we go through the installed software, we can see that things like the extension managers here proton up which helps install proton experimental and proton GE wine tricks is here for Lutris. For games you have Lutris itself and Steam, ignore Spyro and city skylines. Those are the games that I installed. They also have geo overlay which includes mango HUD for graphics. They have blender inkscape and photos. That's gnom photos for internet. You have Firefox for office library offices here programming. You have boxes, which is a VM software sound and video. You have OBS studio, as I said, Kate and live audacity is something that I installed. So ignore that rhythm box and VLC media player are here. And basically that's it. The rest of the stuff is mostly GNOME software. The only other thing that they've installed by default is GNOME tweaks, which is awesome. I think that that should be default on all GNOME installations, but that's just my opinion. So that's the installed software and the layout of the desktop. And I know I went pretty fast there because really all that stuff other than the steam and the Lutris stuff is the most uninteresting part of this entire distro because really it's just Fedora with a whole bunch of extensions installed and a few things for gaming. And that's basically what it is. It's Fedora, but with those things added on top of it. So really all it comes down to is how is Nabara when it comes to gaming? Now, the first thing we should talk about is the fact that I'm not a gamer. So I can't really give you a good comparison over how Nabara is compared to like Archer, whatever. I'm not a big gamer. So the games that I like to play are pretty casual. They're not resource intensive in terms of like needing a huge graphics card or anything like that. So take what I say here with a grain of salt. But I have done some gaming over the last couple hours and my results have been a little bit mixed. So let's talk about Cities Skylines first. This is my favorite game on Linux. I've put in something like 170 hours on this game, which probably not a lot for some of the you hardcore gamers out there. But for me, that's a lot of hours on a single game. And it plays fairly well on Nabara, but it's crashy. And by crashy, I mean that it crashes a lot. Now, the thing is, I can't really blame Nabara for that because Cities Skylines is crashy no matter what distribution you're on. A lot of that has to do with the mods I have enabled. So I'm assuming that it's going to be a Cities Skylines problem and not a Nabara problem. So just kind of keep that in mind. In terms of frame rate, I was getting between 40 and 50 when the game was paused around 30 when the game was in action. That's around normal from my experience. That game takes up a lot of resources in terms of memory. Sometimes it takes up upwards of like 20 gigabytes of memory. So it's very resource intensive when it comes to that kind of stuff. So I'm not really surprised that it lowered that much in terms of frame rate when the game was unpaused. So I have shown you a little bit of the B-roll here for Cities Skylines and really it plays just fine. Like I said, if it didn't crash, I would say that it was amazing honestly, but it does crash so I really can't judge it either way. Like I said, I'm not sure whether or not that was a Nabara thing or a Cities Skylines thing. That just is something that I can't really determine because it crashes on Fedora too. So on regular Fedora, it crashes there, it crashes on Arch, so really it crashes a lot. That is a Linux binary by the way. That is something that is supposedly to work on Linux. So I also wanted to try a game that is Windows only and I ended up trying Spyro. Now, I know Spyro works fairly well on Linux under Proton because I've tried it on other distros and it's no different here on Nabara. It runs fairly well. I got around 40 to 50 frames per second on my hardware, which is pretty good and it works just really well. You'll see some B-roll here again. I don't know that I'll include the beginning of my gameplay because I use a trackball for my mouse and playing Spyro with a trackball is not really all that easy. The camera controls are just not great with a trackball. So I would probably include some of the gameplay from later on when I was a little bit more used to it, but I'm still not all that great playing this game with a trackball. That experience was really good. There was no crashing and the one thing that I normally experience with Spyro is that my computer sounds like an aircraft carrier during the entire time I play it. I didn't have that experience this time. I don't know that it was because I didn't play it long enough and it would just do it later on or if it just wasn't going to do it at all on Nabara, I'm not sure. But the experience overall was really good. I did try a couple other games that I didn't record. So I tried Brain Out, which is a side-scrolling shoot-em-up game. It's not a resource of intensive game. It played just fine. I also played Orbital Bullet. That game played pretty well as well, about 40 frames per second while I was messing around with it. I didn't play around with it for too long because I honestly don't care for the game that much anymore. I did play Civilization 6 for a little while. That experience was just fine as well. I didn't count the frames per second on that because they didn't have Mango Hut up at the time. But it was playable and I didn't notice any differences from when I played it on other distros. So gaming overall, at least in my experience, my very limited experience was pretty good. The only game that I really had problems with was City Skylines. Like I said, that probably was a City Skylines thing. The Proton experience that I had, which would have been with Spyro, was actually really good. It installed fast. It played really well. So if you are here for gaming, which is probably why you choose this distro, I think that you probably have a good experience. Now, like I said, I am not a gamer. So I can't tell you how this thing is going to run things like Grand Theft Auto or CSGO, things that are actually really resource intensive. I'm not sure how those things would play. But from my experience, I would say they probably would play just as well in this distro as they would in any other distro. The difference being here, of course, is that this is out of the box. This is something that you could open up Steam the first minute you have Nabara installed, download a game, or point your Steam towards a library that you already have installed, and just start playing. So there's no setup of Proton here. There's no thing like that. And it means that you can just kind of start gaming right out of the box, which is really, really nice. I did not try Lutris because I'm not a big fan of Lutris. I don't have a lot of games there that I'm really interested in playing. But everything that you need to play games through Lutris is installed. So it should be a fairly good experience. Now, in terms of version numbers and resource usage, in terms of just the operating system itself, it has kernel 5.19. It has about 2600 packages installed. It has zero flat packs installed by default. So that was actually something of a surprise for me because they had the GNOME extension manager there. And that's a flat pack usually. And it obviously was installed in some other way because it wasn't installed by flat pack. FlatHub is enabled by default. So you can just download any flat packs you want from FlatHub easily in the terminal or in the software center. So that's really nice. That's something that's different from Fedora as well. It uses bash 5.16 and GNOME 42.3. Now, you might be wondering why I'm not showing that stuff on screen. And the reason why is because my screen capture is completely frozen right now. And I'm not exactly sure why. I'm assuming it has something to do with Pipewire or with Wayland. So we'll just blame those things. One thing I will say is that the brand new version of OBS is here. This is OBS 28.0 that I'm recording in right now. And maybe that has some bugs that are still being worked out. I didn't think it was actually released. Maybe it was just released today. I'm not sure. It's not the flat pack version. So I can't actually say for sure. I use the flat pack version on my main system. And that hasn't been updated yet. In terms of resource usage at idle, it's basically what you'd expect from a GNOME system around a gigabyte is what you're looking for in terms of memory. It's not going to be great for low-end systems, but you're not going to use this on a low-end system anyways because if you're going to install this thing, you're probably going to be using it for gaming. So you probably wouldn't install it on something that can't game. So that is Nabara. A very, very quick first look. I know there are probably other things that I could have gone through and probably could have shown you a few more B-rolls of me being horrible in games. But the thing is that I found recording in this kind of not all that great. Like I said, my window capture right now and my screen capture are not working in OBS. And I'm not sure why that is. And frankly, I'm quite eager to get away from Wayland and Pipeware right now. So I'm not going to fix it. I'm assuming that that stuff can be fixed or it's just my hardware problem because so many people tell me that Wayland and Pipeware working really well in terms of OBS and stuff like that. That's not my experience, but I'm assuming that's a me problem and not a Wayland and Pipeware problem. So moving on to that, and that's Nabara. If you have thoughts on this distro, you can leave those in the comment section below. You can follow me on Twitter at the Linuxcast. You can follow me on masses on our Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description just below the like button. If you could hit that like button, I'd really be appreciative. It does really help the channel out. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash the Linuxcast, just like all these fine people. Thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon and YouTube. You guys are all amazing. The channel just would not be where it is without you. You kind of spur me on and keep me going. So thank you so very much for your support. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.