The Nobara Project has rolled out version 42, a brand-new release designed for gaming and content creation, marking the distribution’s first release developed entirely under its new rolling-release model.
The most noticeable switch comes at a browser level. After months of stress-testing several candidates, the development team has settled on Brave as the default web companion.
According to the project, Firefox-based options were hampered by a stubborn GPU crash when scrolling VRR-enabled short-form videos. At the same time, Chromium and Vivaldi stumbled on Google Meet when hardware acceleration was active.
To keep the browsing experience streamlined and privacy-minded, Nobara ships Brave with a custom policy set that disables features such as Brave Rewards, Brave Wallet, Brave VPN, and Tor integration, leaving DNS-over-HTTPS in automatic mode. Users who need any of these extras can still toggle them back on.
Moving on, the distribution has quietly unpinned its graphical package manager from both the desktop and the favorites bar. The tool remains installed for power users, but newcomers are steered toward a safer path: Flatpost.
It’s a GTK-based front-end—developed in-house—that consolidates installation, removal, upgrades, permissions, and repository management for Flatpaks across desktop environments. Flatpost also reproduces the granular permission toggles familiar to Flatseal, offering a coherent experience whether users stick with GNOME/KDE or venture into Hyprland, Labwc, and beyond.
Moreover, the new release refreshes its driver-manager UI, letting users hop between Mesa’s standard and Git Vulkan stacks or flip among NVIDIA’s production, beta, and new-feature branches without cracking open a terminal. In addition, Mesa 25.1 arrives sporting extra patches for Wine Wayland sessions and id Software’s freshly announced DOOM: The Dark Ages.
On the software components side, the main updates include:
- GNOME 48
- KDE Plasma 6.3.4
- Kernel 6.14.6
- Mesa 25.1 (patched)
- NVIDIA 575.144
The release announcement provides the technical details and a complete list of changes in Nobara 42. The distro is available for download from the project website in five variants:
- Official: Nobara’s custom-themed version of KDE.
- GNOME: Vanilla GNOME.
- KDE: Vanilla KDE.
- Steam-HTPC: Customized to look/feel like Steam Deck, built for HTPCs, uses KDE.
- Steam-Handheld: Customized to look/feel like Steam Deck, built for handheld devices, uses KDE.
Just pick the version closest to your needs, and happy gaming!
