Attempting to Find a Drawing Tablet for Linux

My Drawing Setup

My Situation

A few months ago I became inspired by the pony community to start creating digital art more seriously and consistently. To do that I’ve been using Procreate on an iPad Pro. For the most part I’ve found this solution to be leagues ahead of other options as far as my use case is concerned; I’ve found that the user interface actually makes sense for use on a touch screen, it performs great, line smoothing works in a way that makes sense for me and it has a lot of niceties that make me reluctant to go elsewhere. Furthermore, the program is available for a very reasonable one time fee. As with most things though, there’s a major catch: Procreate is only available on iOS.

Being forced to use iOS already didn’t feel great as somebody who usually uses Linux, and Apple’s recent decision to implement ID-based age verification in the UK has made using iOS feel even worse. Truthfuly, it’s made using iOS even in this limited capacity unviable. As a result, I needed to find an alternative to both the iPad Pro and Procreate.

On the software side Krita is essentially the only practical choice for me at the moment, so the rest of this article will primarily discuss hardware.

The first potential alternative I’d already tried many years ago was a drawing tablet without a screen. These devices are cheap, plentiful and well supported by Linux. They also reduce neck strain since they enable you to draw while looking at your usual monitor (or so people tell me). However, I find them extremely unintuitive.

I’ve also tried a few Surface devices running Linux; these devices are reasonably cheap, plentiful and a number of older models are well supported. Most recently I’ve owned a Surface Go 2 for a few weeks and while it’ll certainly be my go-to portable Linux art device it’s far from a seamless experience; getting Krita to work correctly requires setting display scaling to 100%, and for some reason the device seems to struggle to handle both the touchscreen and stylus input at the same time (for example Krita will often ignore my multitouch input to rotate the canvas if I’ve been using the stylus shortly beforehand). Krita also recently stopped recognising the eraser built in to the Surface pen for unknown reasons. Finally, it’s worth mentioning that Surfaces aren’t particularly powerful devices and will become uncomfortably hot if you’re working with a lot of layers on a high resolution project.

The final device I’ve tried that I think is worth mentioning here is the Daylight Computer, a weird Android tablet with a monochrome RLCD display that’s capable of running Lineage OS and Krita. I want to write about this device more in depth at some point but for now I’ll say it’s by far the best device I’ve ever used for sketching (with the exception of my iPad Pro) due to it’s reflective 120hz screen that helps to cut down on eyestrain while being viable for drawing unlike eink. Although, Krita is very obviously not designed for touch screens, and the build available in F-Droid is quite out of date.

Having tried all of these devices I decided that the best device to replace my iPad Pro that would remedy all of the problems I had with the above solutions would probably be a desktop drawing tablet with a built in display. Believe it or not using these devices on Linux is a bit of a minefield, nevertheless the three main brands do work under Linux with various pros and cons.

The Options

Wacom

Wacom is probably the gold standard for a Linux drawing tablet; they’re well understood devices that have open source drivers included out of the box on most Linux distros.

Unfortunately though these devices are more expensive than the alternatives (though not as expensive as I’d believed at first glance). These devices seem to hold their value surprisingly well too, so you could easily spend a decent amount of money on a device that lacks modern features like HDMI output.

XP-Pen

Another brand of drawing tablets I’ve seen spoken highly of is XP-Pen. The main advantage of these devices over Wacom is that it’s much easier to get a drawing tablet with modern features such as HDMI or even USB-C at an affordable price. They also have proprietary Linux drivers available from the manufacturer and open source drivers available from OpenTabletDriver.

The main disadvantage of this brand of drawing tablet is that it’s not plug-and-play on Linux and the open source driver is somewhat frustrating to get setup and requires Microsoft’s .net framework.

Huion

Huion is another brand of drawing tablets that’s spoken of highly. In short, everything that I wrote above about XP-Pen is also true of Huion.

Kamvas 12 Pro

Ultimately I ended up with a Huion Kamvas 12 Pro, not because I felt it was the best device for my use case (if I ever find a Wacom at a good price I’ll get one of theose) but because I managed to find one in good condition on eBay for £30.

Ultimately I can only say so much about the Kamvas 12 Pro because it’s the first device of its type that I’ve ever used. However, I find the build quality to be decent, the included stand to be useful and versatile, the anti-glare screen useful for reducing eye strain and the USB-C breakout cable useful for keeping everything neat. My only complaint about the device’s hardware is that the spring in the pen’s tip is weirdly off putting coming from an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil. Overall I’m sure that this device is nothing spectacular, but for £30 I feel like I got the bargain of a lifetime.

As far as Linux support is concerned the Kamvas 12 Pro can be said to mostly function as intended. The main caveat is that the built in touchbar and adjusting display settings, such as brightness and contrast, aren’t supported using the open source drivers. The open source drivers being clunky to use and depending on .net is another huge blow too. Another problem I’ve found is that pen pressure doesn’t work in Clip Studio Paint V2 running through Wine, though V5 seems to work fine. I’m sure that the proprietary drivers would work better but I refuse to use them. Finally, I’ve found that the Huion tablet needs to be connected to my computer at boot in order to work, and if I change my display settings or disconnect the device it stops working until next reboot. Again, I’m sure that the proprietary drivers would fix this.

Despite all this, I’m able to use Krita without much issue and have created a few art pieces using this setup in conjunction with my Daylight Computer.

While the Kamvas 12 definitely does what I want it to do for the time being I’ll definitely be on the lookout for an affordable Wacom tablet, the improved Linux support and reduced alone would be worth the money in my view.

In conclusion, if you’re looking for a drawing tablet for Linux and you’re not on a tight budget I’d suggest getting a Wacom, otherwise it seems that most of the major brands will work despite being far from “plug-and-play”