I’m looking for some feedback regarding upgrade path for Linux (with running Krita as the main objective). I’ve been using Kubuntu for a long time and my old Wacoms still work in 24.04 (Xorg, Plasma 5.27). But the big distros seem to be making a big switch to Wayland and Plasma 6. After trying Fedora 41, Kubuntu 24.10 and Ubuntu 24.10, I could not get my tablets to work without major glitches. The drivers work (correct Wacom tablet is recognized), but there are major problems with cursor, ranging from freezes to cursor being stuck in place.
I used virtual machines for some of these tests, but that did not seem to be the source of the problems - for example in Gnome there were way fewer issues than in KDE.
I’m well aware that Wayland does not offer the same solid tablet support that Xorg does, but have you actually had any success with the late-2024 distros (especially KDE/Plasma)? I’m wondering if it’s just me having these problems.
I would try SUSE Linux, if you go for Leap or Tumbleweed (the rolling-release variant of SUSE Linux) should make no big difference I believe. I use Tumbleweed for years now via a VM, and I’m very happy with that combination.
I do not follow their current new development (MicroOS), but guess that I’ll switch in about one or two years.
I never ventured as far as SUSE, and Fedora was my furthest as rolling releases go (both hard install and testing a VM).
Apart from using a specific distro and a rolling release (you say you have some history with that), what DE are you using on top of that – did you switch to Plasma 6.x and Wayland?
Plasma with X11, but I haven’t used it for about a year and guess that it will be now on Wayland. But it may be possible that they’ll ask the users if they want to change to Wayland instead of forcefully switching them over, because that it can have a really huge impact on the user experience.
For now I am using Debian 12 with X11, I believe it is the best option as of now. If you try latest bleeding edge distro for production during this transition phase you will lose time in maintaining it and dealing with all the missing features and workarounds.
There is a lot of work remaining for the transition to happen seemlessly. For example even if desktop environment is transitioned to wayland creative apps need to be ported to wayland too. If all goes well wayland transition will be good for artists in 2-3 years. If not then we only have the option to go back to windows or macos.
I upgraded to Plasma 6 recently and it switched to Wayland automatically. It was way too buggy, I had to switch back to X11; I haven’t had any major issues since I switched back, both my wacom tablet and Krita are working fine.
I read your blog post.
Your experience with distros is close to mine. Every time I almost got convinced that everything Debian/Ubuntu was uncool and horrible (although I used Xfce and KDE), I ended up going back to Kubuntu LTS for convenience. Sometimes I miss a feature from a newer app version, but LTS is a solid, worry-free environment. I use appimages for all the production apps anyway, so I get all the latest features.
I got concerned seeing that everyone pushes Wayland these days. Like you said, maybe in 2-3 years the community developers will finally make a switch. It would be nice to add a HiDPI to my older monitors, but I guess that won’t happen for me now, I’m sticking with X11 mainly because of Krita.
You confirmed my experience. There are articles online claiming that Wayland is ready for drawing tablets, and unfortunately it’s completely the opposite for a lot of popular distros and DEs (like KDE).
I have no issues so far with Wayland and my graphics tablet (Wacom Cintiq), on Manjaro KDE Plasma 6, Krita AppImage. However, I only recently switched from X11 to Wayland because X11 gave me too much trouble recently, and since the whole thing is basically deprecated I don’t expect there to be any fixes anymore.
So far my Wayland experience is pretty solid. I can’t tell about Krita however. I only use Wayland since a few month now and didn’t use Krita much in that time, mostly just playing games and the usual office work.
Downsides in Wayland so far
Tablet settings not as much as X-Wacom offers but the bare minimum is there
color management is available in latest releases but if you’re on an LTS you probably have to wait a while
Krita runs in compatibility mode (although that’s not Waylands fault)
pros that made me stick with it
fractional scaling
different scaling per monitor (which is good since I have three with different resolutions)
much smoother experience (don’t know how else to describe this)
HDR support is already there (I belive), didn’t try it on my desktop yet but works on my mates Steam Deck (Arch with KDE and Wayland)
runs much more stable for me recently compared to X11 (but that’s just me I guess)
For why your tablet didn’t work in VMs, this might just be due to the host not exposing it to the guest and instead just sending the events as a mouse event’s through the pointer API, therefore the guest has no idea of a graphics tablet even existing.
I guess if Wayland gives me too much trouble with Krita, I just switch the session to X11 (I have both installed) for until Krita is ported, no biggy.
Thanks for sharing your story. I find it valuable.
Clarification: my tablet actually is exposed to the VM.
The VM Manager for KVM/QEMU instances has a way of sharing a USB Host Device to the guest (=the tablet ends up disconnected from the host, and appears as connected to the guest). So the tablet name actually does appear in the guest VM with correct buttons, and can be configured in Wayland session.
What happens, however is that the tablet pen does not visually move the cursor at all in KDE/Plasma+Wayland. As the invisible pen moves, you can see the UI element state change to hover, but the cursor remains static. Only the mouse works correctly.
Interestingly, inside the Krita image window, I can actually draw - the cursor works, pen pressure works etc. But the moment the pen leaves the work area, the cursor stops. It would appear that this is something inconsistent between distros.
It feels like as of November 2024 it either has to be 1) bleeding edge distro with all latest developments for Wayland, Plasma and Qt or 2) X11-based old school safe zone like LTS. This is a great example why we need LTS distros for production.
You encouraged me to experiment some more, maybe I’ll do a clean install of Manjaro directly on hardware (other than Fedora, which as of v40 acted like described above) and see what happens.
For those looking for similar answers, I did some additional testing and will share my conclusions below.
Summary: The latest distros with Plasma 6 and Wayland are workable, but I experienced interface and stability problems outside of my comfort zone.
Mixing HiDPI displays with lower-res ones generally asks for independent scaling, which is only possible with Wayland. Wayland does not support drawing tablets as well as X-11. While I say that, if I had to work in Krita under Wayland, I could probably do that, at the cost of some convenience that the Wacom drivers offer under X-11 (switching pen button functions, switching active screen with a shortcut are hard or impossible under Wayland+Plasma)
NOTE: The huge problems with tablet cursor not moving which I mentioned above were all caused by the virtual machine (KVM/QEMU). Turns out, KVM does not know how to interpret the tablet pen for the VM guest, even if the drivers are loaded.
I had to install and test everything on bare metal, and in some cases (Manjaro, Tumbleweed) had to be installed on a HD before I was able to switch to Wayland session (X-11 was default with live session).
Some findings:
All the Plasma 6.x distros I tried showed incorrect cursors outside of Krita and Firefox (showing crosshairs when using tablet pen)
Fedora KDE spin only comes with Wayland, so there’s no fallback to X11. I would avoid that distro for Krita right now.
Ubuntu 24.10 (GNOME) appears to have good support for Wacom, but I experienced freezes in the interface where both tablet and mouse would stop working and I had to do hard resets. I don’t know if it was because I was using it as live session (without installing), but I was super unhappy with having to use GNOME.
Kubuntu 24.10 had some interface quirks that caused me to try rolling distros instead, in hope those issues would be solved faster.
Tumbleweed KDE looked quite promising but I also experienced weird behaviors that would make me feel uncomfortable if this were my production machine - maybe it was the Plasma 6.2 (example: tablet pen cursor would not work on some system menus, mouse did)
Manjaro KDE felt like the most polished experience with Plasma 6.1 + Wayland. It was definitely workable and I would probably go with Manjaro if I had to switch distros. [edit] Brushes that use pen rotation worked great as well, just so you know.
I was unhappy with how Krita looked on scaled screens (the 4K screen would have to be scaled up to match the others, so it would defeat the purpose of using it as primary display)
I hope this will help someone. Again, things in Linux sometimes move fast, and sometimes get stale. Wayland shows promise, and if you’re willing to compromise, it can definitely be used with Krita and a drawing tablet.
Please file bug reports to relevant projects like plasma, fedora bug tracker etc with these issues. They should be made aware of these otherwise the current hype is that wayland is the savior is ready for production.