While cutting edge testing distribution such as Fedora are going Wayland only and the proponents of such move say that this push is required to shake things out. I would like to highlight some of the things which are not there yet on the graphic tablet configuration front on plasma wayland. Although the basic support for the tablet is provided through libinput and those who are content with the default will have no issues, those who rely on configuring the tablet will have hard time on wayland.

I was told that fedora making this move will help us get up to speed and it will pressurize developers to fix broken and non implemented things in plasma wayland soon. But sadly I do not see this happening in the graphic tablet configuration side of things. Hope this post gets the attention from the developers and they pay some attention towards the needs of us less lucky people who do not know to code it ourselves.

I am not sure if these deficiencies will be fixed in plasma 6 release as most of them are marked as wish list or extra things. Thus making the transition from plasma 5 to plasma 6 a regression for people depending on these things. If you compare the current graphic tablet configuration section on X11 to that of plasma wayland you will understand what I am saying.

Graphic tablet support bugs

  • No way to map a portion of the tablet are to the screen - Some people have large tablet and sometime they want to map a portion of the tablet to the monitor - bug report - https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=457703. Moreover the UI for mapping tablet area and its buttons is slightly inferior to the UI of the same functionality in X11 KCM. - Bug report - https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=477750

  • No way to create multiple profile of the tablet configuration, so that artist can choose different configuration like shortcuts , pen pressure etc for different workflow like inking a comic or doing vector art - Bug report - https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=477671

  • No way to fine tune pressure curve of the tablet, various people draw with varying pressure some people draw with heavy hand some use light touch, configuring pressure curve helps artist to get nice lines. - bug report - https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=457705

  • Often graphic tablets have a touch strip or ring but on plasma wayland there is no way to assign shortcut to touch rings - bug report - https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=477752

  • Related to the above some tablets allow users to switch the modes of the touch ring for example you can click a button and change the mode from one set of shortcuts like scrolling to another set of shortcut like changing hue or zooming in and out. but this is not available in plasma wayland - https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=477787

  • Creative applications often have use of single modifier shortcuts, artists map this to their pen buttons for example holding ctrl to colour pick while painting but this is not possible on plasma wayland - https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=461259

  • There is no way to calibrate a display tablet so that there is no wierd offset - https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=476982 this is in the works and there is an open MR by an awesome KDE contributor but it will probably be in 6.1

  • There is no way to switch between absolute and relative mode of the graphic tablet - bug report - https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=477898

  • There is no way to assign mouse click presses to pen button as shortcuts, For example you want to change the default and assign a different button on a pen to do middle mouse click to pan the canvas in krita it won’t accept middle mouse click as a shortcut- https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=457636

  • The pointer for the graphic tablet is a cross in plasma wayland, it doesn’t even change to resize handle cursor or any other things depending on the context. So if you want to resize a window with your pen it will be troublesome to use this pointer. - https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=477570 I am not sure how this was gone unnoticed until now.

I hope some kind volunteer developer notices these shortcomings which were possible earlier on X11 and are not possible on plasma Wayland and help us artists types who rely on these features to use and enjoy wayland like it is intended without worry. Some of these things were possible on X11 for a decade and yet wayland takes us back to square 1.

  • Strit
    15•7 months ago

    This is exactly why they are doing it. To get people to report bugs for issues they are having that is not standard use. :)

    Thumbs up for the links to the bug reports too. That way the developers can easily look into it.

    • @raghukamathOP
      8•7 months ago

      Yeah I know but they are also not providing any fallback for people hit by those bugs. Testing can be done without harming user workflows. And fedora punishing and forcing users will not get those bugs magically fixed. I am not sure some of these will be fixed now before fedora 40. Anyway Fedora can do whatever they want. My wish is to get these bugs more attention.

      • Strit
        6•7 months ago

        Only Fedora is not making it possible to go back. Every other distribution will still provide an X11 session with Plasma 6.

        • @raghukamathOP
          4•7 months ago

          Yeah you are right and people who were using fedora will need to move distribution suddenly. Actually Fedora is a bad choice for production for this reason, we never know when fedora will ditch you and when we complain about this fedora fanboys will only say why did you choose fedora or they will say just change distribution. So taking that advice I already switched from fedora and I no longer recommend it for any artists use. After all there are bazzillion of distros to choose from.

          Again as I said the post is not about fedora itself, it is about the false premise that unnecessary urgency fixes bugs, in this case it is did not do anything and this post is to get the people to notice these bugs to get them fixed

          • Strit
            3•7 months ago

            I disagree that Fedora doing this did nothing for the development. It generates bug reports, which in turn generates fixes. Sure, the fixes might not make it into Fedora 40 or even 41, but it helps the Plasma developers see what issues there still are out there as bug reports pop up.

            The plasma devs likely don’t have a graphics tablet to test on, so they rely on the community to find these issues and test the fixes.

            • @raghukamathOP
              3•7 months ago

              I am not against fedora pushing things and fedora helping in testing things it is its job as a test bed. Fedora does not give any fallback to people affected that is the issue. Again I do not use fedora now so that is not my issue what they do.

              The plasma devs likely don’t have a graphics tablet to test on, so they rely on the community to find these issues and test the fixes.

              Some of these things were communicated in 2019 (https://phabricator.kde.org/T11660) and again during artist and plasma developer meeting too. You can read about it here (https://phabricator.kde.org/T14971) So fedora is not the only medium by which bugs and requirement are conveyed to developers.

        • @Pantherina@feddit.de
          1•7 months ago

          The question is if they ported the old X11 KCM over to Plasma6! Can someone check that? I am on Kinoite rawhide so no X11 I think

          • @raghukamathOP
            2•7 months ago

            No they have not ported old KCM but created a new one from scratch. Hence any shortcoming or lack of feature is considered as wishlist and extra thing to implement.

            • @Pantherina@feddit.de
              1•7 months ago

              I would call that a regression and not a wishlist? You can for sure ask to tag those issues correctly.

              So Plasma6 X.org has less graphic tablet settings, right?

              • @raghukamathOP
                2•7 months ago

                So Plasma6 X.org has less graphic tablet settings, right?

                Plasma 6 xorg might have the X11 KCm which is the most featureful configuration frontend for graphic tablet on linux. It is on par with windows and wacoms utility. KCM on wayland is not so much.

                I would call that a regression and not a wishlist? You can for sure ask to tag those issues correctly.

                I had changed the severity once but it was reverted back and then other discussion about this was not entertained you can check the bug reports see the comments marked as spam.

        • @raghukamathOP
          4•7 months ago

          Yeah and i think x11 itself will be available until 2032 on redhat atleast , that is not the issue. Artist can use old distros too but it would be nice to see these things get attention after all linux is for everyone and not just for developers right.

        • @raghukamathOP
          2•7 months ago

          The fallback is announcing this in the release notes, so users depending on removed features can wait with the upgrade until the issues are fixed or move to another distro.

          Yeah I understand hence I won’t be advising or suggesting any artist to use fedora :)