Pen Tablet

Did some searching and everything was quite old here. I almost hijacked AxlOz's two and one half year old thread but had an etiquette moment so started a new one instead.

Looking for a pen tablet. I don't want to do anything professional. Plan to use it for RPGs to draw new maps or trace existing ones and then modify them. I have no requirement for portability or wireless connectivity. Really I guess you could say I"m looking for a pen shaped mouse?

I'm planning to move to an entirely Linux environment this calendar year so Linux and GIMP support are at the top of the list for requirements.

The XP Pen Deco Pro seems seems to be well thought of and supports both Linux and GIMP.

https://www.xp-pen.com/download/deco-pro-s-m.html

The Xencelabs looks to have a good bundle along with Linux support but no official GIMP support. People have got it working with GIMP and Xencelab did provide support for them so open to the idea.

https://www.xencelabs.com/products/pen-tablet-series

The Huion tablets also look good but only support Ubuntu which is not the distro I am planning to use. The driver is available in the AUR for Arch so that might make it viable.

https://www.huion.com/products/pen_tablet/Inspiroy/Inspiroy-Frego-M.html
https://www.huion.com/products/pen_tablet/Inspiroy/H951P.html

I looked at Wacom because at the start they were the only brand I knew and much to my surprise they have no Linux support.

I am happy to spend enough money to get the job done but given my intention is not to use this for any real drawing or money making I'm not sure that buying features will demonstrate value unless life without them would be so bad I will just put this in the cupboard next to everything else I wasn't immediately good at.

Any recommendations out of these or ones that I have missed being illiterate in this area?

 

I have a Wacom Intuos Small - this model - my main use is to whiteboard while presenting at work and it does a good job at that. Not one with a screen, which took a little getting used to, but has worked out fine ultimately as I can focus on looking at my monitors. Purchased from JB when it was on special. I wanted something small to handle

I use it with sway wm and it was a plug and play experience, with libinput handling the device no problems and no bs software - pens and buttons work. There are also 5 buttons on the tablet drawing surface, which seem to by default map to mouse clicks but you'd probably be able to remap them to something else like a macro. I have it constrained to just one of my screens so that it is functionally the same aspect ratio, otherwise it will attempt to accommodate your movements across all your screens on the tablet. I don't know what this might mean if you have an ultra-widescreen monitor. To do this was a single line of code in my sway config

Code:

input "1386:965:Wacom_Intuos_BT_S_Pen" map_to_output "DP-1"

The one thing I don't like about this tablet is the side buttons on the pen. I still occasionally hit them accidentally. Probably just need to disable them but haven't bothered to quite yet

 

Thanks for that. I am looking for a pen tablet, not a display tablet so what you are using is fine for me too. I am also wanting to look at the monitor and really just want something that would feel a little more "natural" than a mouse.

I did some more research after your post and while it isn't official Wacom support the native kernel drivers seem to be mostly targeting Wacom which doesn't really surprise me given how long they have been around.