Manjaro Linux

My Wacom Works Out Of The Box Under Linux!

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I got that creative itch recently to revisit drawing, and I also wanted to see how easy it was to get it running under Manjaro. So today I killed two birds with one stone, and surprisingly it’s quite a lot easier to setup compared to Windows. The drivers were installed by default, and it was practically working right from the get go! The only “difficult” thing I really had to do was configure it to run on one monitor with an easy shell script:

Now I can shitscribble to my hearts content! I played around under Krita for a bit, just doing different doodles and playing with different brush settings. I’m waaaay out of practice, my drawing hand is kinda shaky, and it gets tired after about an hour. I really need to build up my drawing muscles again. 😛 I’ve been meaning to get back into drawing, but the time was never there. That’s the problem with having too many hobbies, but hey! you’re never bored.

Goodbye Mint, Hello Manjaro

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With the new PC build in place I felt it was a good excuse to upgrade my Linux install, though I couldn’t decide between upgrading to a newer version of Mint or venturing out to try another distro. I contemplated trying Solus OS, but found it to be a little too heavy for my liking. I’ve heard Fedora is getting better on the gaming front, but that distro still leaves a sour taste in my mouth… CentOS for gaming is also too much of a pain to setup for gaming (but it is excellent for running this website!), so I finally settled on the latest version of Manjaro Linux.

This was surprisingly easy to setup. Usually when I setup Linux there are at least two different repositories that I have to install in order to get some of my favorite programs (or having to compile them from source myself). But right out of the box this came installed with the latest open source mesa drivers, Vulkan, controller drivers, and Steam is even preinstalled! I still recommend updating your software/drivers after any OS installation.

I couldn’t find OBS on the package manager, but it was easy to grab via snapd. This version of OBS comes with all kinds of plugins already pre-installed, most of which are handy for livestreaming, and my personal favorite; the VAAPI plugin for recording with AMD GPU’s. Now I record my gameplay directly from the GPU just as I can under Windows. I’ve known about this plugin for quite awhile, but never got around to compiling it for OBS under Mint or CentOS. I did some test recordings with Sonic Mania and Crash Bandicoot using Proton, and the quality is on par with my Windows install. This will make it easier for me to do comparison recordings between Win 10 and Manjaro.

I’m happy to finally see Linux get this kind of attention! This has definitely come a long way since the days of having to gather up like 12 different repos and getting stuck in dependency hell in order to get half of these things to work properly. Now 97% of the stuff I use everyday runs outside of Windows… stunning.