I used to use an old Monoprice 10x6.25, the original model with no express keys from about a decade ago, it was a rebranded UC-Logic and worked right out of the box for as long as I had it. I really liked that tablet, had good performance, decent build quality and the batteries lasted forever, I think over the ~8+ years I had it, I changed out the battery maybe 3 times.
Recently I picked up a new Huion HS611, that has also worked right out of the box (with a recent kernel), thanks to support provided by the digimend dev that has since been included upstream in the kernel. The media keys worked fine, performance is good, though I will say I kinda miss using a battery powered stylus, this new stylus feels too light and there are times where I go to move the stylus around too high above the surface and it gets out of the activation range, which causes slight jumps of the cursor that I didn’t used to get with my old tablet and they can be mildly jarring, but not that big a deal. It feels more sturdy though, which is a plus in it’s favor so there are pluses and minuses on that front, having tilt support really made it a worthwhile replacement though.
I was thinking of picking up an XP-Pen Deco Pro Medium, but at the time I was shopping around, that was still lacking support for it’s touch ring, dial and express keys and such, so I went with the far cheaper alternative from Huion and haven’t regretted it so far. The story might be different for those on older LTS distros with an older kernel, as this tablet is pretty new and support for it isn’t even in the current stable digimend release (though you can get support using the version 10 rc), So that is something to keep in mind, for probably the next few months or so. I’m on Manjaro using the latest 5.7 kernel and it seemed to work just fine with 5.6 as well before I updated the other day.
I will say though it is a bit hit or miss if you want to use the wacom driver. When I followed the digimend instructions for adding an xorg config file for my tablet to get it to use the wacom driver so the kde tablet settings tool would recognize the tablet, I lost the use of the media keys along the top, which was a disappointment. So I removed that file and restarted without it and that returned it to using the libinput driver I think and I got those buttons functioning again, but then the kde gui stopped recognizing it again. But the weird thing is, after using xsetwacom to set a few things from the command line, like restricting the tablet to my primary screen, the kde tablet settings thing picked up my tablet again, even without having that xorg config file, so it seems I can use the GUI to configure things again, and I still have use of the media keys! So that was a pleasant surprise.
My main problem now though is that I’d like to play around with mapping the touch strip on this thing to something in Krita to test it out, maybe brush size or something. But I haven’t the slightest clue how to do that and haven’t had much luck finding anything on that so far. If anyone has experience with getting touch strips on Huions or other tablets working with xsetwacom, do let me know. It would be much appreciated.
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