One year of drawing on Linux as a hobbyist artist using potato PC

or Fedora KDE on Athlon X4 950, Radeon HD 5670 (512 MB) and 8 GB of RAM

TLDR - it's doable

It did require some setup and tinkering, but in the end I can draw, browse the web, and perform regular tasks just fine. Limiting factor is the old GPU, a comfortable minimum is probably something like RX 550.

Drawing

Wacom Intuos S (wired) works out of the box. I specifically waited for KDE to implement a proper settings page before switching to Linux, so mapping it to the screen was no issue. Outside of drawing applications the stylus support can be spotty, resulting in some bugs, but none of them is a deal breaker. The most irritating one, where Plasma's window previews and tooltips don't go away, can be "fixed" with a band-aid of disabling "panels and widget tooltips" globally.

Krita fulfills all the needs I have of a drawing program, I've been using it for ages. And on Linux, as a bonus, .kra files have thumbnails and can be opened in a viewer of your choice just like the regular images!

Hardware

Such an old GPU is barely supported. The cooling fan only has two states: Idle and Jet Engine, so most of the time I have frequencies locked down to 157 MHz core and 300 MHz memory via CoreCtrl. That way it doesn't try to take off each time I move a window... at the expense of hardware acceleration in browsers. Oh well. I also tried to get GTX 650 working, but the proprietary drivers for it don't seem to support Wayland.

The CPU is sufficient for my tasks. Unfortunately there are no GUI frequency controls, so if I want it to run cooler, I have to manually lower p-state using the cpupower command after each boot, since it requires sudo password.

8 GB of RAM is enough. After disabling Baloo file indexing and removing Akonadi & PIM suite, the system after a cold boot takes ~1.6 GB.

Automounting of the secondary NTFS HDD via GUI didn't work until I modified some system files following the instructions of a KDE dev on reddit... which are by now deleted.

Games

VNs made on Ren'Py do work, no surprise here.

Holocure works via Steam's Proton layer, albeit with some performance losses and minor glitches.

Warframe doesn't work. If anything, the fact that it was able to run at all on this PC under Win10 is a testament to DE's insane engine optimization efforts.

Software replacements and quirks

No hearing aid/protection options in Plasma by default. Solved by installing Easy Effects to have a customizable system-wide compressor and limiter.

Switched Firefox and VLC to Flatpak versions to avoid issues with missing codecs.

Fooyin as a replacement of Foobar2000 for local audio player.

Friture for rolling audio spectrogram that is missing from Fooyin. An upgrade, since it works for any audio source!