Hi, I have a fairly old packard bell, that has a capacitive screen, and I want to buy a stylus for drawing, if possible.
I have read a little about styluses, and would like to see if I can get a pressure sensitive active stylus, and wondered if anyone can make a recommendation. I am currently using fedora 31, soon to be 32, and I can compile software, drivers, kernel etc without too many issues.
I wonder if it wouldn’t be a good idea to create a pinned list of devices, with issues, compatibility etc?
Unless anyone knows if this is being done somewhere else already…
I’d be surprised if an old HP laptop with a capacitive touchscreen was suitable for use with an active screen stylus. You’d have to check that by contacting HP or give the exact model number in case anyone here knows it.
If you’d be happy with a separate drawing tablet, there are many that are suitable for use with Linux and these two topics may be of use and interest to you:
Well Wacom is the best I think (totally biased) but there is no official support on it in Linux.
So the better wacom tablet you get for Linux the less support you have for it. they have very generic drivers in Linux that literally downgrades your tablet
for Linux I would not recommend Wacom despite their quality.
I had made my review before on one of those posts but this is a recap I guess:
no HD support, capped in half. so the mouse moves a bit weird and you loose all the refinement of movement you could have.
Pressure is as bad as my old bamboo tablet (crappiest wacom you could get, so bad that it ceased to exist). Pressure is said to be capped in half but I don’t believe it. your smooth lines are hard stuck on max or min if you get even remotely close (I would say close to a forth of full pressure?).
monitor drivers are faulty and glitchy by default. you can correct the renderer but the colors are simply bad and dull. So no full color range.
All the money you spent for the extra features are literally sent to the bin because the drivers don’t even recognize them, and those that recognize are recognized poorly.
you can’t access the drivers to edit them as you should because wacom has made all the drivers fully work in software now. So no adjusting monitor brightness or contrast what you see is what you get. you need to edit Linux itself and not tablet. and trust me Linux does not have even half of the output options you should have.
If you buy drawing tablet such as huion h640p not a drawing monitor like huion kamvas or wacom cintiq, you can use huion in linux with digimend kernel. Just check if your drawing tab is supported here : https://digimend.github.io/tablets/
I’m using Deco 01 (non-display) on Anarchy/Mate, with digimend etc installed, and it works perfectly, + batteryless stylus. On sale at the moment (£55, amazon UK).
For Krita a fix is needed to be able to bring up the pop-up palette, but it’s straightforward, even for a non-techie like me, and, if you buy one, just tag me and I can post the fix I saw from someone.
For active styluses your laptop screen needs to have a digitiser, not just a touch screen. You need to make sure that you actually have one, and if you have one you need to find out what type it is.
There are two main types of digitisers for laptops: Wacom AES and N-trig (aka Microsoft Pen protocol), which are incompatible and each needs a supported pen. A few active pens support both (e.g. https://www.wacom.com/en-us/products/stylus/bamboo-ink#Specifications), but you need to check before you buy anything.
