So, I was having a hard time trying to update Nobara 38 to Nobara 39. Did the KDE swap, followed the website instructions to upgrade but in the last part, after:
$sudo dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=39 -y
I'd get:
Error: Transaction test error:
file /usr/lib64/libopenh264.so.2.3.1 conflicts between attempted installs of noopenh264-0.1.0~openh264_2.3.1-2.fc39.x86_64 and openh264-2.3.1-2.fc39.x86_64
Tried several solutions to this without success but noticed it's just that two packages in the upgrade are trying to write the same file. My solution was to just disable the openh264 Cisco repo for the upgrade with:
$sudo dnf config-manager --set-disabled fedora-cisco-openh264
You can do this also in the Diskover preferences.
After disabling the Cisco repo you can proceed with:
$sudo dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=39 -y
$sudo system-upgrade reboot
Then, after a successful upgrade, go to Diskover > Preferences and enable (check) the fedora_cisco_openh264 repo. Finally, do perform a system update with Nobara update tool. Install whatever it tells you it's missing and then you are done.
Figured I'd share this here since the threads in Reddit don't show any clear fix to the problem. Hope someone can use it.
With an increasing amount of update issues on Nobara Linux, I think it shouldn't be recommend to people new to Linux. There're other distros like PopOS that are better tested.
But I generally believe the long-standing popular distros should be recommend instead of the new projects with many changes to their base distro. E.g. Garuda, Nobara, Zorin, ... Being opiniated and configured are great for people who know enough about what they're getting into.
Of course people can use whatever they want. In my case, I think Ubuntu based distros can't deliver the best performance for gaming because they use older graphics stacks and kernels that, by the way, are configured for generic hardware and performance. On the other hand, I have been using Linux for more than 20 years, so I can take this issues and solve them if they keep appearing.
Yes, there's no doubt in my mind Nobara is not mature enough and shouldn't be recommended to novice Linux users/gamers. Using Fedora instead of Nobara, is way easier for a regular user, comparing the upgrade process of both was like night and day.
I generally agree, altough PopOS specifically has a more recent kernel than Ubuntu. They're currently on 6.6, which was the current release until a few days ago. I believe they also use newer mesa than Ubuntu, which should make it similar to rolling release distros in terms of performance.
This is why I recommend PopOS to people new to Linux, as few distros are newbie friendly with recent kernel+mesa. Most distros with recent packages either like to break on updates or don't ship proprietary codecs by default.