I’m a pro concept artist, currently working at Blizzard. I was using Clip studio paint so far, but decided to switch to Linux recently and took a look at Krita to replace CSP. I was really impressed by Krita, I think it’s a great program, my only issue is stability.
I’m using Fedora currently, first week was fine after the initial setup figured out. But last week I had several problems, I think a NVidia update broke Krita. I had to switch to Fedora 44 beta to be able to use my tablet on Krita again. Worked fine for a day, then I had other issues showing up: tablet pencil moving but can’t ‘click’ and other weird behaviors.
So my question to other artist on Linux out there: what’s make Linux-Krita stable ? Can’t afford to loose days because something broke on update. Is it the distro? Switch from NVidia to Amd ?
For linux tablet drivers, OpenTableDriver is generally better imo.
Fedora is good. But since it uses KDE Plasma ( Mostly likely you do), It uses Wayland. Which is not stable for Nvidia.
I recommend using Linux Mint or CachyOS.
Edit: Recently models of Wacom display tablets are probably not supported on OTD ( OpenTabletDriver).
Also you could still use csp on linux by using bottles. I recommend looking it up.
For more info about drawing tablets i recommend this website:
I can recommend a few things for optimal stability on Linux:
Use an AMD (or even an Intel) GPU if you can. AMD and Intel ship their open source GPU drivers with the Linux kernel, which means that the whole graphics stack is under the control of the distribution itself and doesn’t rely on 3rd party driver packages being kept in sync. NVidia GPU drivers aren’t terrible on Linux by any stretch, but because they have to be sourced from NVidia on a different update cadence, in my experience it’s common to run into situations where your distro/kernel updates first, leaving the older drivers broken and requiring manual intervention (ie: rolling back the distro update, or updating the driver). When I had an NVidia GPU it would work fine for months, but would eventually update and boot into a black screen. Advanced Linux users can fix that, but it’s pretty frustrating and I think newer users wind up feeling like they broke something. AMD cards just work and continue to work on Linux. I would imagine Intel is similar.
The pinnacle of stability these days is probably “atomic” distributions, like Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite, Bazzite, Bluefin/Aurora, Nixos and SteamOS. Unlike traditional Linux distros where each update basically replaces various files on your computer, atomic distributions serve all of their users an identical OS image. Updates either 100% succeed or don’t apply, and if something is wrong with an update, you can simply reboot into the previous version and continue with your work. The trade-off here is that additional packages usually have to be layered or containerized through something like flatpak apps or distrobox/docker. This is the kind of distro that you probably couldn’t break if you tried. Bazzite is an easy recommendation in this category, since it’s gaming-centric, similar to SteamOS, built on top of Fedora with a lot of quality of life improvements, and really popular.
These aren’t things you need to do, as plenty of people use NVidia cards with more traditional distros, but I think if you’re trying to optimize your system for stability that’s the best way to go. (Even if it does take a little more effort on initial setup.)
As for the tablet issue…
It’s hard to say why your tablet would stop working if it was working before… It could a bad distro package update or even a bug in whatever version of Krita you have.
Tablet driver support is still kind of hit and miss, unfortunately. In my experience they usually work for drawing (with pressure, tilt, etc.), but things like button binding my depend on the specific tablet and make and model. Graphics tablet - ArchWiki has great information on how this all works.
Does Krita’s tablet tester utility (Settings → Configure Krita → Tablet Settings → Tablet Tester) register any tablet inputs? Does your desktop’s wacom tablet settings area recognize your tablet?
yeah, Xwayland updated fixing important stuff, but also brought this bug that “nullifies” pen inputs, as far as I looked up, a fix should be out soon
This is the bugged version/package, for anyone curious xorg-x11-server-Xwayland 24.1.10-1.fc43
Thank you all for your answers, that was very helpful. I actually tried CachyOS and had an eye on Bazzite as well. The reason I came back to Fedora was to be able to install my company vpn, but I actually find a work around that yesterday, so I may move on to another distro to see if that smooth some edges. I also think that was a bad timing thing (NVidia update + Fedora update).
Anyway, I really like Linux, if I’m confident I can stay on it for game and work, I might invest in Amd, that should also smooth some edges from what I’m gathering.
Hello