Nobara 39

64-bit

Founded by former Red Hat Software Maintenance Engineer Thomas Crider (aka GloriousEggroll), Nobara is a young distribution that is quickly gaining popularity. A fork of Fedora, Nobara adds to its installation what many users install on their own: not only the proprietary drivers needed to take full advantage of their hardware, but also dozens of patches to ease the experience of novices, with a major emphasis on online games.

Replacing Fedora's Anaconda installer with Calamares, Nobara sets up a core system and then offers users the chance to create WebApps, set up gaming sites, and choose a bootloader. Only then does it turn to desktop appearance and choices such as themes and icon. This setup makes for a longer install than most modern distributions, but it probably saves time in the long run. When installation is complete, users have a system with a minimum of productivity apps, but with heavily patched system settings and utilities that include configuration for home devices such as drawing tablets and the Wine Windows emulators.

If this description sounds promising to you, see this month's Distro Walk for a closer look at Nobara.

Nobara 39 and Manjaro 23.1.4 Gnome

Manjaro 23.1.4 Gnome