Hi! I’ve recently gone on a bit of a binge reading about free and open source software and I want to stick it to the man but in a safe way! My current serious setup is a beefy desktop with a 32inch screen tablet and I always draw using clip studio paint. However doing some cleaning recently I have found this laptop and my old bamboo from back when I was a kid that apparently no longer works because of old drivers on my windows 10 machine.
The laptop in question is a thinkpad 11e, AMD A4-6210 APU, 64 bit architecture 4 gigs of ram. The tablet is an old Wacom Bamboo CTH-470.
I’ve already tried puppy linux on it but was dissapointed with its ram usage and how slow it read/writes to disk. It seems to be good for older laptops but not seriously performance oriented for programs like blender.
My question is, given my weaker spec hardware; what is the best distro/desktop to squeeze every once of performance out of krita? I’ve not been able to find anything about the recommended distros on the FAQs or anything other than that it works on linux. I was wondering if krita is being developed on linux in a particular flavour like debian vs arch so I can expect better stability or performance on one or another or something like that?
If there is no particular difference in distros for krita then I was hoping for suggestions of a distro that runs krita well on lower end hardware and doesn’t hog loads of ram for itself. I’ve only ever used ubuntu based distros but I am open to trying something knew! Ideally I want performance and stability for krita and maybe the ability to at least open the odd blender project!
Maybe you look at Distrochooser and Distrowatch and look for a slim Linux, especially the desktop should not be too resource hungry, XFCE would be a slim desktop, because your laptop is at the lower limit of Krita, for a smooth operation necessary resources. KDE and also Gnome I find too fat with the available specs. But to give a general recommendation is hard for me.
My old Wacom Graphire 2, with eraser tip at the top of the stylus and a puck mouse (doesn’t have to be used) works well on Linux. A nice surprise
I know I’m getting away from the spirt of the topic but why not run a ‘full fat’ Linux distribution and desktop environment on your beefy desktop computer?
You can do BIOS level boot drive selection at startup or, what I do, have the boot drive pluggable on an externally accessible SATA slot.
I looked at Distrochooser and got just a massive list of recommendations but Zorin, Mint, and Elementary are the top 3. I don’t have any experience with any of them and I don’t know how they will run with Krita!
I like XFCE a lot and I don’t know why but I don’t like Gnome at all! My intuition is validated! Those gnomes are not to be trusted!
I did a little bit of web searching and discovered this: https://ubuntustudio.org/
It looks like they have an XFCE desktop version too and it is based debian witch I do have experience with! At least from their advertising it seems to be exactly what I am looking for in a distro but I am not sure how light weight it is! Does anybody here run this distro with Krita? Does it work well?
Loads of distros come up when I search “old computers” in distrowatch but it doesn’t look like there is any metric of how much of a performance difference there is between them, especially for my usecase. Is there a consensus on what is the “best performance distro”?
Hi @AhabGreybeard Yeah I’m hoping the tablet will magically work on Linux because I’ve tried for many months to get it work on windows 10 like it did on 7 but alas no joy. I’m super disappointed that I almost threw out a perfectly functional tablet because of windows and their update compatibility shenanigans.
I was thinking about it for a long time but I decided that when the time comes I would buy a whole knew extra SSD for my chonker just for linux. For now I find the idea of having a backup system just incase something happens to my main rig to be much more appealing. Also I really want to find some use for the old laptop xD, And also also, I’m doing this as kind of a test, I always heard that linux has better performance than windows and I kind of want to put it to the test and see how far my laptop can really be pushed! Plus also the laptop is relatively simple, unlike my main rig that has 3 moniters and a drawing tablet and an Nvidia gpu which I heard does not run well on linux. I don’t really want to spend a lot of time diagnosing problems that are unique to my particular rig setup! There’s too many variables there, unlike on the laptop lol.
XFCE isn’t as light as people think it is. And KDE isn’t as heavy as it used to be.
Here is a more recent one:
Generally on the GTK side, I think MATE is probably the lightest of the more popular desktops.
But if someone is fine for bare bone minimal, LxQt and Enlightment are the lightest, but there won’t be much stuff there and support would be limited.
@haddy generally, for new linux users Linux Mint is probably the easiest choice as Mint is based on Ubuntu which is the most popular. And Mint itself is pretty popular among new users. For lightness, I would opt for Linux Mint MATE.
@haddy Your old machine sounds like the one I’m using now with only 4G RAM. Windows was killing it so I switched to Linux Mint. Everything, especially Krita, is working really well. I chose Mint Xfce as it’s fairly light on RAM and easy for a non-techie to adjust to. Also, it was easy to get my Wacom Intuos to work by installing input-wacom from the Linux Wacom Project.
I would recommend Linux mint or kubuntu. But keep in mind 4gb ram is not a lot so you will eventually face limitations if you work with fairly big canvas close to A3 300ppi etc.
I started with Linux Mint and MATE (8 years ago) and now I’ve settled down with Debian and MATE.
I’m surprised by the comparisons from @KnowZero because when I started, MATE was heavier than XFCE which was heavier than LXDE. I tried all of them and LXDE was very lightweight (but not very full featured) so I used it on an old laptop. Has LXDE disappeared or become LXQT?
I suppose things have changed since I last had a look at them.
@haddy Ok, you have a Personal Project - go for it
Maybe it’s that particular Nvidia GPU. With my GTX 750Ti (it’s low-end, I know) I have no problems when using the proprietary Nvidia drivers.
I have a low end laptop with Celeron N3060 (which is half the power of A4-6210 APU according to some benchmark), 4gig RAM and 32g emmc, and is now running OpenSUSE Leap 15.3 KDE, which often considered as “heavier” distro and work just fine.
The OS + Desktop Environment (KDE) takes about 400~600MB of RAM, which is light IMO, but some animation effect will eat up quite some CPU resource (can turn off manually, of course).
The same laptop was on Linux mint XFCE back in 2018 and also worked quite well, though I didn’t check the CPU and RAM consumption back then.
I use Krita just fine on Linux Mint XFCE on my old laptop (Sony Vaio vpceg18fg, used to be Windows 7, upgraded RAM from 4GB to 8GB) so I’m giving a vote for that.
Wow I went to bed and woke up to all these replies! Thank you everyone for your input!
@KnowZero yeah even from the newer graph MATE seems to perform quite competitively and I like the pictures I’ve seen of it on the internet! The thread in total seems to be fairly in support of Mint so I’ve decided I would go for Mint + MATE
@sooz thats super awesome for me to hear! I’m glad that I won’t be an edge case with my hardware! I’m a bit worried about drivers but it sounds like this Linux Wacom Project that you mentioned should definitely be something I check out. It gives me hope that my tablet will work!
@raghukamath based on everyone’s recommendations I think I am going to go for Mint. From the graphs I’ve seen MATE seems like it will out perform KDE but if I try out Mint and for some reason hate it then I might try Kubuntu next! Also yeah I know how big projects can just gobble up ram, my main rig has 32 gigs of ram just so I can open blender projects xD I’m hoping to use the laptop maybe more for sketching or whiteboarding and obviously the big fancy files with 5k layers will still have to be done on the chonker. I’m just hoping to dip my toes into linux and FOS in general and if I can add this laptop as a serious functional part of my workflow that would be super cool!
@AhabGreybeard it is indeed a personal project xD
I’m going to be installing exactly what you installed 8 years ago (Mint+MATE)! Wish me luck! About Nvidia I’ve heard some good things but mostly I’ve seen that if something goes wrong with the display then there is very little you can do to really fix it, so I would rather avoid the heartache. Eventually I will bite the bullet and buy a newer AMD gpu but basically the way prices are right now I just can’t afford an upgrade. Eventually when Microsoft kills win10 I will be making the switch completely to linux, my hope is that win10 will still last another 3 years at least and that by then I can buy an AMD gpu.
@Lesqwe56 yeah the performance difference between even GNOME and MATE seems to be barely 200mb so I’m sure I’m nitpicking more than anything xD Plus if I don’t like the desktop I can just change it to something else! Once again I have hope that the laptop will be usable for my needs! Linux in general seems to be like magic for lower spec hardware!
@Konayachi another vote for Linux Mint! I’m going to try it with MATE first but I might just end up trying out all the different desktops! If I get amazing use out of the laptop I might un-ironically upgrade the ram xD I honestly don’t even know if the ram is upgradable on my 11e but that’s an adventure for another time!
(sorry I can only mention 2 users in a post lol)
Thank you everyone for your replies! I’ve decided to try Linux Mint with MATE! Wish me luck!
@haddy I do of course wish you luck and many useful learning experiences.
The good thing about Linux is that there is no deeply buried license activation code so you can do full system backups and system clones by booting up from GpartedLive on a usb stick (or CD) and making entire partition backup copies on another hard drive. Then restoring them later, if needed.
With a laptop, you can use a usb to SATA adaptor cable to connect to an SSD or even a 2.5" hard drive with power coming from the usb socket of the laptop. USB is slow but that’s when you go to make a cup of coffee/tea.
@Michelist official support till 2025 is good new for me I guess, but I don’t want to be caught off guard when that time comes either way. I hope I can make the switch completely off win10 before 2025 lol.
@AhabGreybeard when I was installing mint it asked me about system restore points so I set them to do weekly saves but I don’t think it would save my files, just my system. After a fatal hard drive failure a few years ago that killed my entire win10 and everything on it I’ve learned the hard way not to keep my work on the same drive as my OS and keep frequent backups of everything. Frankly installing Mint and Krita took me less effort than partitioning my disk lol. I’m not sure at this point it would be worth it for me to backup my drive to an external drive but maybe in a couple of months I will be singing a different tune! Definitely something to keep in mind tho!
I ended up installing Linux Mint with the MATE de.
It was surprisingly easy even with making the disk partitions myself! It runs SUPER smooth and Krita loads in seconds! I haven’t really put it to the test on a massive project yet, but so far I am very very impressed with the performance.
On my win10 “main” chonky desktop machine with an SSD and much “better” hardware generally, it takes me like 2 minutes from the time I want to open Clip Studio, to the time that I actually start drawing; on my much “worse” laptop loading into Mint from a hard disk takes comparable amounts of time to loading into win10 on an SSD and from desktop to drawing in Krita is like a handful of seconds! And it doesn’t ask for my account login and password every time I start Krita unlike CSP which also shaves of a few seconds and is pretty annoying tbh.
So far I’m really happy and I am even considering installing Krita on my desktop alongside CSP (at least for now lololol). If I like Krita enough I can definitely see myself eventually completely switch over to it, I just need to learn it lol. My CSP shortcuts are ingrained in my muscle memory :*(
In Settings → Configure Krita → Keyboard Shortcuts, you can change any existing default shortcut so that it uses a different key combination or you can make a keyboard shortcut for any listed action that doesn’t have a default shortcut.
These changes will be remembered in future sessions.
You can also save the total configuration of whatever your shortcuts are ‘at the moment’ for later restoration or migration to a new computer.
I am going to do that but first I am going to need to sit down and write/change them all which is going to be a massive pain. But once I do it once I’m just going to save the config and never have to do it again lol. Good advice though! Thank you!
Hello and welcome to the forum 
