I am assuming that Nobara does not have the same NVIDIA bugs as the Steam gaming mode from Bazzite. Am I correct in thinking it is quite similar, but not identical since nobara is not based on fedora silverblue or kinoite if I recall right?
Also just noticed that Nobara steam gaming mode seems to be based on kde plasma not gnome, otherwise they are alike, since you can also do kde plasma with Bazzite – at first I thought Nobara had a gnome HTPC mode but I don’t think it does, since it boots up into gaming mode too, like Bazzite beta nvidia version, but they don’t have a gnome version of that.
As a home user, can anyone explain why I might prefer bazzite over Nobara, I do not recall, but Nobara does not have the same bugs as Bazzite in their gaming mode, correct? I did experience an issue with updating Nobara once, it broke during an system update. However, I do not recall having NVIDIA driver bugs with it. It has been some time since I last tried Nobara builds, and I believe think they have improved. Currently, both Bazzite and Nobara seem to be based on Fedora 41. Also I think Nobara doesn’t work with secure boot on, but that might of changed not sure on that one, where Bazzite does work with secure boot on, but that’s a small thing I guess, unless that changed since I last tried it.
I think no one can give you a full comparative analysis of both distributions.
The major difference is in design philosophy of the distro itself - one is atomic/immutable using cloud native technologies (Bazzite), the other is let’s say a more traditional distro (Nobara). This greatly influences how distros are built, distributed and updated. It does not make them more or less susceptible to bugs. They just provide a different experience and/or features.
If you are not experienced user, use the one that has your desired feature set and works for you. If you are experienced user, you will use whatever you like more or suits your usage style - bugs can be workarounded in any distro if you are experienced enough.
It will have the same bug if you use the same configuration. No one is using some special secret sauce, aside for borrowing things from the SteamOS, everything is done with the open-source model.
This means improvements are shared and people can just yoink things that worked well for another if it works for their usecase as well, and they can work together to solve a common problem.
The “Steam Gaming Mode for Nvidia” isn’t some special secret sauce stuff. It’s things that you can configure yourself manually on Arch if you want to. The main difference between each editions of Bazzite/Bluefin/Aurora and any other flavor of ublue/Fedora Atomic images (or really any distro) is their defaults and how they manage packages in the background.
Test different configs, find the one that works best for your usecase. I know that this is a forum, and you’re allowed to keep asking stuff. But if you want to enjoy using Linux, I recommend you to just try stuff out and come to your own conclusion - we really aren’t Windows or macOS where everything is determined by a company, you get to decide how your system works so you do need to experiment by yourself to get everything down to a t.
