Manjaro and Cintiq 16 Pro for professional illustration

I just want to report that Manjaro and Cintiq 16 Pro work perfectly well for professional illustration purposes.

I’m a professional illustrator that has been intensively using a MacbookPro 17 and iPad Pro for work for most of my career. I decided to move away from it a few months back and changed my setup to Manjaro with a Thinkpad workstation and a Cintiq 16 Pro. I didn’t find much info at the time but decided to take the leap nonetheless.

I would have liked to read a message like this when I was considering the change. So, for any other professional illustrators that are thinking about taking the same step, here it is. I would not dare give advice, but I can certainly confirm that Linux (Manjaro) and Cintiq Pro work together perfectly fine for professional illustration purposes. As for software, I mainly use Krita.

I have found some hicups, but I’m pretty sure I can fix those if I just dig a little bit. I haven’t spent much time on the small ones. The big ones were solved very rapidly.

The only real pain in the ass is receiving Keynote documents from my clients, which I have to convert to PDF from an Apple device (laptop or iPad in my case).

So if you are a professional illustrator considering the move and need some external input: I did it and haven’t regreted it. I haven’t missed my old system for one minute. Rather the opposite, I’m much happier with the Linux and open-source environment, to be honest.

Hope this helps.

Cheers.