Nobara Linux on an Oryx Pro oryp4

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Heyo! I have an older model Oryx Pro from System76 that I obtained fairly cheaply, prior to being laid off from the company with a few other people. Let’s run Eggy’s Nobara distro on it!

Sorry for the blurry photo, but the first installation attempt was seemingly a failure, due to a bad USB drive. I went ahead and burned the Gnome version of Nobara Linux (based on Fedora) to a different USB, slapped it in and the install went off without a hitch!

Once booted back up after the install completed, the Nobara team’s point-and-click installer for media codecs popped up. I went ahead and agreed to it, then a follow-up pop-up point-and-click installer came up for the NVIDIA drivers required to use this Oryx Pro oryp4 model’s GTX 1070.

I believe, outside of NVIDIA being pre-installed in Pop!_OS, this is the best experience I’ve had with a Linux distro to date when it comes to installing the proprietary NVIDIA drivers. This Oryx Pro is the only piece of tech I have, besides the Corsair One Pro I’m selling, that still has NVIDIA hardware in it. Moving forward, I’ll mainly be sticking to Intel/AMD hardware for ease of use in open-source computing, but this will be a great spare should my Dell G5 mess up at any point…though I think that isn’t likely.

Since it seems Nobara is handling the NVIDIA driver stuff fine with their auto-installer, I went ahead and installed some additions I usually make to my Nobara gnome installs via this script I have on github. Above you’ll also see me using their point-and-click solution to install the Xbox One controller firmware. Note that I had previously installed a few things on battery before the older battery cut out, so now I’m reinstalling the controller firmware. After that, my Xbox One wired controller worked fine!

Just a few last things needed and we’re good to go! That said, it looks like I would have to fully install the System76 nvidia driver package for Fedora here if I wanted active switchable graphics, as it looks to be that there’s no menu for choosing whether you want to be on Intel/NVIDIA graphics from the power menu in the top right of Gnome.

Above, you’ll see I also went ahead and installed some benchmarking tools to test the temperatures with the stock thermal paste that System76 and their repair partners apply after replacing system mainboards. Looks like the temps got between the 70-80 celsius range before the cpu began thermal throttling, as the fans were on full bore the whole time so there wasn’t much that could change in terms of airflow. Let’s see if we can increase that headroom a bit! I’m going to go ahead and repaste the CPU as well as the GPU with Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut to see if that makes a difference.

After the Kryonaut was applied, I re-ran the CPU benchmark for a few seconds/minutes to see how the termperatures were looking this time. After that, I ran a GPU benchmark as well. Threw a little neofetch in here too, so people could see what kernel I’m running on Nobara here from the fsync repo that Eggy uses. I’ll be keeping this Oryx Pro as a backup gaming machine, and might end up replacing the Upcycled Guest Gaming Build based around an older Xeon with this as it will take up less space next to the workbench. From what I’m seeing here, the kryonaut only gave slightly better temperatures in this test case. Regardless, it’s nice to have fresh paste!

I also have a Thinkpad T400 or T500 that’s fully librebooted as of a few years ago. Might update libreboot on that and list that in my projects-for-sale page if anyone would be interested in that.