OpenTabletDriver VS libwacom

First follow the installation guide on https://opentabletdriver.net/

I don't have a huge amount of experience with Krita's Wayland performance because the situation on Wayland is still sub-optimal for art in general. Tablet support has gotten much better, but configuration per-app or tied to the desktop environment still seems to be a big issue. The idea that my tablet configuration might stop working if I switch off of a desktop environment is kind of a non-starter to me. It stinks because I really want to use Wayland, but even as recently as a month ago I tried to see if I could make the switch and couldn't.

Truthfully, if someone has a lot of money to dump around, devoting a few full-time developers or dropping cash on https://github.com/OpenTabletDriver/OpenTabletDriver would probably go a long way towards encouraging Wayland adoption from artists.

As far as I can tell the issue is not that Wayland can't do tablet control on the same level as X11, it's that the tools built around those capabilities still seem immature. OpenTabletDriver looks very promising but seems to have limited device support, limited in no small part by what tablets the devs have access to (my Cintiq 32 is unlikely to get added any time soon because it is no longer being sold and was expensive and uncommon when it was on the market).

The NVIDIA situation is also a problem, but there's nothing anyone can do about that other than yell at NVIDIA more.

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> The text tool is a joke.

The text tool should see considerable improvement soon; the entire text engine got rewritten in the last release, the devs just only had time to get it to feature parity with the existing tools.

I believe Wacom is a first class citizen in Linux. They have it in the kernel (https://linuxwacom.github.io/). There is also https://opentabletdriver.net/ that is multi-platform.

If the Wacom driver is no longer compatible with your system, you might want to consider using a third party driver like OTD (https://opentabletdriver.net/)

Use OpenTabletDriver, you might have better luck.

One of these programs is called OpenTabletDriver and can be found here

You might give OpenTabletDriver a try, it seems like it supports that particular tablet according to their list of supported tablets.

- DIGImend and OpenTabletDriver look pretty similar in github activity(?)

You can try OpenTabletDriver, a 3rd party open source tablet driver, with support for your tablet. It has many different smoothing algoritms and filters and much more customisability than Wacom drivers, as well as pressure support.

The CD is for driver installation, however you don't need it. Drivers used to come on CDs. For Linux, you have two options, both third party: OpenTabletDriver or linuxwacom. For Windows, you might be able to find an older driver version in the archives on Wacom's website, since newer drivers dropped support for it (thanks, Wacom) or you can once again use OpenTabletDriver. Personally, I recommend using OpenTabletDriver for both operating systems. It's much more customisable, gives you higher hover height, allows for more pen compatibility and more.

The 13ALC6 has tilt, so it's very likely the 13ALC7 does, too. But, like you said, that's not direct information. Check your digitizer on Device Manager > Human Interface Devices > HID Touchscreen or HID Pen. If the hardware ID is 52xx (for example 52a2) it's probably AES 2.0.

You can check Device Manager and see if the four-character Hardware ID of your HID Pen or HID Touchscreen devices (under Human Interface Devices) match any of the hardware IDs on the list at libwacom, or you could borrow an AES-2.0-only pen and see if it works.

Good question! Technically yes, you can compare the "HID Touchscreen" or "HID Pen" Device ID in Device Manager to the list on libwacom which is an open-source project that helpfully lists lots of digitizers. If it says "Sensor Type: AES", "Features: Touch (Integrated), Tilt", it's AES 2.0 (because 1.0 doesn't have tilt).

The same ID 256c:006d as yours -> https://github.com/linuxwacom/libwacom/issues/469

The name is wacom because wacom was the originator, but I think that it will work with other manufacturers if it is listed inlibwacom.

Technically you can look at the 4-hex-digit hardware ID of the pen digitizer in Device Manager and then look it up in libwacom, but obviously that's not how it's supposed to be. Wacom (and Microsoft) doesn't publish the version of their digitizers anywhere so it's always a game of test-which-pens-work-on-it.

So, for instance, I should be able to see the stylus in the Wacom section in the Settings but don't because I assume it's yet to have been added to the libwacom database. At least that's what I understand based on what I've read so far on it. My next step is to see if I can get it to work based on this.

This issue and its workaround is described at https://github.com/linuxwacom/libwacom/issues/281. Briefly, you'll need to edit the libwacom tablet definition for your tablet, adding 0xffffe to the end one of the lines. After saving the changes you should be able to open the Graphics Tablet settings without it crashing.

Check this. If it's listed here and entered about a year ago or more, then it's pretty much guaranteed to work out of the box and be configurable in the GNOME settings.