Works good on my desktop with Krita and a Cintiq. Can’t tell for my laptop which is a Tuxedo wich is currently running TuxedoOS.
I thought I’d give Linux another try recently but anytime I’ve tried Linux, it’s super unintuitive and difficult to do the most basic of things and hasn’t gotten much better. People seem to think having steam is everything. I live krita but it’s not with the trouble just to use that on a whole os. I also have a non-Wacom tablet called a huion 2.5k qhd 13pro but it doesn’t feel nearly as good as my Wacom. will try again once productivity stuff is pushed more, should be there in 3-5 years
Oh I’ve actually tried wine, too much hassle and could not get it to even work with pressure
Neither my cintiq 27QHD touch nor my cintiq pro 4k 16in are supported in that.
I tried bazzite and cachyos but the tablet gui is weak, only shows 1 pen to configure. How ever will I use my multiple pens?
Until incentives change Linux tablet support will remain functional, but never best-in-class.
Linux is excellent at servers, development and gaming (now) for the most part, still behind because of anticheat things that need kernel
But it is structurally bad at vender-driven creative hardware, devices that rely on proprietary firmware logique, markets dominated by closed ecosystems
Wacom support has gone worse with the advent of Wayland. The Wacom drivers for X11 let you configure so much, meanwhile the general one-size-fits-all driver for Wayland only recently got the ability to map buttons, which is kinda sad. Unfortunately I’m kinda stuck with Wayland because X11 with three monitors and different resolutions, UI scaling (and HDR) is impossible to set up correctly and also simply stopped working at some point for me and preventing me from even logging in. But I also couldn’t keep on using windows anymore because everything was broken after every update, it constantly had issues with pretty much everything and kept getting simply annoying when the started to feed ads directly into the start menu and whatever.
You could give Ubuntu Studio a try. Not the most recent distro, but I tried it with a Live USB on a Wacom Mobile Studio Pro 16 and didn’t encounter driver issues, even if it is a pretty exotic piece of hardware.
Even David revoy 2 years ago knows it gots problems and it’s hard with wayland.this problem is still ongoing to this day
He made a big blog post about it Debian 12 KDE Plasma: The right GNU/Linux distribution for professional digital painting in 2024. Reasons and complete installation guide. - David Revoy
User experience is king on desktop and Linux just isn’t there yet and it’s sad because it seems really efficient and got cool flashy effects. It’s gotten amazing for gaming to where it even outperforms vulkan on windows because vulkan is just a guest on windows. But I wonder why it’s ignored and put off when it comes to tablet gui and art stuff even with powerful people like David revoy.
Gimp is awful and the most unintuitive program I’ve ever used. Basically the only good art program native on Linux is krita
Any distro will do, it’s purely up to user preference. ![]()
That being said I personally really like Arch Linux for it’s tinker-ability and stability, but one thing to keep in mind is that Arch Linux primarily aims to exist as a user-centric distribution, not a user friendly distribution. In reality though, really anyone could use it if they wanted to.
yeah zero reason for me to use raw vanilla arch going through all that trouble when theres amazing forks like cachyos. im not looking to tinker and to solve hard problems, only for a distro with strong full featured tablet gui like the propietary wacom driver is
Ah, well I totally understand.
Arch isn’t actually as difficult to setup as some people make it seem, but if your looking for a distro that is more pre-configured there are other options out there. Any GNU+Linux system can install software from another GNU+Linux system, so distro choice isn’t really all that applicable here. Everyone on this thread is going to have a different opinion regarding what distro to use, as everyone has personal preferences and recommendations that work for them and others.
When it comes to configuring GNU+Linux systems anything is truly possible, it’s just depends on whether or not your willing to dedicate some time to learn how. Not all GNU+Linux systems are meant to be “user friendly”. User friendly and user centric are two very different things. A lot of the issues described in this thread above actually appear to be caused by user error…
I recommend also asking around the Arch wiki and other GNU+Linux oriented online forums, as there are many talented people out there who can help you troubleshoot your system, even if you are not directly running Arch Linux.
One of the main reasons I love Arch Linux as a distro is because of the amazing wiki and extensive documentation. The Arch Wiki has LOADS of information on all sorts of software, even applicable to non-arch systems.
One such source from the wiki which may come in handy. I personally use Wayland.
Interested in seeing how yours is setup, show me the work you did making use of these forums and wiki with getting your arch Wacom cintiq setup going with the gui and multiple stylus per app pen configured
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I finally found a distro that actually works with my extremely rare edge-case krita workflow
Its called SUSE linux enterprise desktop , it works good with my cintiq + internal laptop screen
Hardly anyone has or uses the Wacom Art Pen in linux that i know of except me
tilt , pressure + barrel rotation all work , i require X11 for rotation to work
Wayland breaks my workflow and it could be years or a decade + before rotation works in it
The solution for me is SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop
I use Ubuntu. I tried other distributions, but I use a dockingstation with Displaylink and only Ubuntu works. I tried kubuntu as well and installed the driver, but I had freezes everytime I tried installing Displaylink. I hope that gets fixed, when Ubuntu abandons x11. But at least for now it works
I see, i once used a Thinkpad t440p on a dock running fedora xfce with a 27qhdt connected with a display port cable and it worked ,These days i need x11 strictly for barrel rotation to work , so im using SUSE x11 gnome becuase it will be supported until 2031, a solid 5 years +

