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.
BTW, here is a good article about progress of Wayland for digital artists – it looks fairly up to date.
Thanks!