I’ve been wondering about what seems like the cursor lagging behind my pen on my Cintiq. On long, fast strokes it clearly takes a tiny while for the cursor to catch up to the pen tip. It hasn’t bothered me enough in actual use to go and fix until I just remembered to look into it again.
It seems like the culprit, at least a major one, is a particular default setting in the Wacom drivers. By default, the “RawSample” setting is set to 4. This means the driver takes 4 samples of pen input and averages them together. This will smooth things out, but will also introduce some lag.
The setting can be changed, though. If you’re using KDE, I believe this can be changed right in the tablet settings GUI. Otherwise, in a terminal, you need to run
xsetwacom list devices
to find out what precisely the device you need to change settings for is. Then you can run the command below, replacing the device name in quotes for the correct one in your case. (It’s the one with ‘stylus’ at the end):
xsetwacom set “Wacom Cintiq Pro 32 Pen stylus” RawSample 1
This’ll temporarily turn off the averaging of the raw samples. If you like it, you’ll want to add this to a script that runs at system startup.
It’s likely much more noticeable on the 32" 4K Cintiq I have. I didn’t really notice it before I got this thing, either. On a non-screen tablet you might not notice at all since you don’t see the pen on top of the cursor.
Probably, I have the 27" Cintiq with 4k resolution (but without touch). I generally have less issues with my tablets (cintiq and intuos pro) after switching to KDE. Maybe it has better defaults or its something with the window manager. I definitely will keep an eye on it, when painting the next time.
Unfortunately xsetwacom is X specific and doesn’t work in Wayland sessions. I have no idea if there is any way to use anything similar in the Wayland world
I’m using Mint 20 with the Cinnamon desktop . The main difference between any distros I’ve tried, as far as using Krita goes, is what if any tablet configuration GUI the desktop environment comes with. KDE has the most feature-rich configuration GUI, but I don’t feel like going to the trouble of configuring KDE in general to behave the way I want… Fortunately I only really need the calibration tool regularly, so the bare-bones tool Cinnamon provides is enough for me.
The configuration GUI on KDE now depends on xf86-input-wacom which provides the xsetwacom command line options. On wayland libinput is used. Recently there has been some efforts to bring back the graphic tablet GUI to wayland on KDE but right now it is bare-bones so in some time it will be there.
I hate it so much and despite trying everything I can think of, I only partly manage to disable it. Every so often when i happen to brush my arm against the screen, windows and virtual desktops will shift around. Sometimes it happens while I’m drawing too.
I have a Intuos Pro with touch but disabled it because it wasn’t more than a giant touch pad, basically. Palm detection was spotty and I didn’t find any use for it. That’s why I didn’t buy a cintiq with touch (touch also would have cost me 1000€ more). Now with a screen tablet I sometimes thought touch would be actually useful, and I was regretting not buying the touch one, but now, reading what you wrote, I feel better not getting it.
I actually find touch on my Cintiq really useful, especially for rotating/panning the canvas (which I do constantly). To the point that I can’t imagine myself using a non-touch screen for drawing at this point. Different strokes for different folks I suppose.
Maybe it’s just Pop OS that is stupid when it comes to this. I’ve been meaning to install another distribution for a long while now, but installing an OS isn’t as fun as it used to be so I’m constantly putting it off for another day.
