I’m pretty new to art in general (unless you count the compulsory lessons at school over 50 years ago) but I want to get into digital art. Currently I’m trying to use a Lenovo Android tablet, which is OKish but has a rather small screen. I tried using Weylus to connect my tablet to my desktop machine but that proved to be a disaster. This means that I’m now in the market for a (probably secondhand) tablet. There’s a Wacom One available at CEX but would something like that be OK or should I look for something with a larger usable area? How about makes other than Wacom? are any of them worth bothering with and how well do they behave with Linux, specifically Linux Mint?
Getting any tablet to work on Mint is going to be a pain since (to my knowledge) it still lacks a UI for configuring graphics tablets. KDE at least has one for Wacom, Gnome has a general one that only supports the most basic features but for “any” tablet. When it gets to sizes I prefer large one’s because they give me more precision. The closer their size is to your screen the less your strokes have to be translated and it feels more like what happens on the screen is exactly what you do with your hand.
The Wacom One, in its various forms, is a perfectly good graphics tablet of the simple kind. Also, it works with Linux Mint with no need for additional drivers.
The point made by @Takiro, above, regarding the lack of a UI is valid but I use a Wacom tablet on Linux Mint with no problems because I don’t map the tablet buttons to keypresses for shortcut activation. (I would forget what the mapping was anyway.)
Watching You Tube review videos is a good way to get an idea of how well people seem to be able to use a particular tablet. They tend to be mostly Windows users though you could try looking for specific Linux use.
The point about tablet physical size is a good one and when you have various dockers arranged around the workspace then the canvas area can get quite small in comparison to the tablet area which is mapped to the entire monitor.
The Canvas Only Mode (press Tab to toggle it) is good for that, making the canvas occupy almost the entire monitor according to the options you specify.
I believe that Huion and XP-Pen now make Linux drivers available for their tablets and they do make good tablets. You’d need advice from other people about using them with Linux though.
I have two monitors and the tablet covers them both
Whatever the mapping is between tablet surface and monitor(s), I get used to it.
I just watch the cursor on the monitors, I never look at the tablet, then move my hand/fingers to make things happen. I freely admit that I am not an ‘artist’
But wouldn’t that distort your strokes on a horizontal axis? So all horizontal movements is longer than on the tablet relative to the strokes on the tablet. This would drive me crazy, not only having basically just half the tablet available but also all circles would become ovals.
My hand isn’t ‘trained’ to draw circles in the way that someone with ‘traditional’ drawing/painting experience might have.
So, to draw a circle, I look at the brush cursor on the monitor and move my hand/fingers according to where I want to draw.
If I want a real circle then I use the ellipse tool (with Ctrl+Shift as post touch modifiers).
If you are not averse to installing proprietary tablet drivers, then most brands will work fine on Linux. I haven’t tested Linux Mint, but I could check it out with live boot or something to confirm.
I can vouch for a few models, personally I’m very happy with Huion. The pens are nice and the tablets have a good build quality, although I avoided low end models.
Wacom One (screenless) sounds like a good choice too, but I haven’t used it.
Two main things to watch out for in relation to Linux:
AFAIK, Bluetooth never works out of the box (maybe an open source driver could handle it somehow, but I don’t know).
firmware update typically requires Windows (the updater app is for Windows). This is a one time thing and maybe you even won’t have to do it, so that’s probably not a big concern.
I use XP-Pen Dec LW on Raspberry Pi, which is a version of Linux. I have the following limitations. I connect with USB because I don’t know how to get Bluetooth working. For some programs I need to switch to mouse to interact with Windows. Things like Chromium I need to switch to mouse. I also don’t know how to hot plug the tablet, as doing this just resets the system.
I have no problem with the idea of installing drivers so that wouldn’t be a limitation. I’m more worried about a cheap unknown brand not working at all or not lasting more than a few months.
While Bluetooth would be nice, it isn’t essential and, hopefully, I can get around the firmware update issue.
Huion does seem to be a decent brand, from what I’ve seen so I’d certainly consider them.
