Wacom with Ubuntu: what is your experience?

[Retro_Garage]

I was given a discarded Aiptek drawing tablet, it's older, but I plugged in and had to do NOTHING. Worked perfectly under gimp. It goes used for about $50. Very happy it found me because I was about to buy one! It's no WACOM new tablet but it gets the job done for my animation project I'm working on. I was able to get all my pencil and paper drawn ideas drawn into gimp so I could give them some life.

It's an Aiptek HP 12000U model and works out of the box with 13.10 and up.

hp pavillion 753n, 2.53ghz pentium 4, 768mb ram (runs smooths), dual boot ubuntu 13.10 and winXP sp3.

[Bucky Ball]

@Retro_Garage: Just an off-topic note. 13.10 has reached end-of-life and is no longer supported by Canonical or these forums. See HERE.

[jehan-marmottard]

Just to confirm other people saying that modern kernels supports most Wacom tablets out of the box and very well.
Sometimes very new models may be supported a little later on Linux distributions than on proprietary OSes, but most of the time because newer kernels take some time to be integrated downstream (i.e. Ubuntu would not provide the kernels as soon as it is released obviously since it needs testing and integration time).
In my case, we use a Wacom Bamboo, as well as an Intuos 5 without any issue.

As for configuration, there are GUIs actually. It is not mandatory to do it by command lines. Unfortunately they are often integrated as desktop (GNOME, KDE, etc.) tools, so it's hard to recommend one and stick with it. See for instance, for GNOME: http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/e...ith-gnome-3-10

[kurja]

As for configuration, there are GUIs actually. It is not mandatory to do it by command lines. Unfortunately they are often integrated as desktop (GNOME, KDE, etc.) tools, so it's hard to recommend one and stick with it. See for instance, for GNOME: http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/e...ith-gnome-3-10

afaik there is no gui for 'vanilla ubuntu' that would allow button configuration.

[Gustaf_Alhll]

I got a Wacom Intuos S Pen. It's small, but it works. I use it for making artwork on the computer and I have no problems doing it.
The program I use is called MyPaint. It's made for usage with a Wacom and it works really well.
MyPaint doesn't have any powerful image editing tools like Photoshop and GIMP, but it has really well pen physics unlike the others.
It's the best one out there when you're writing on the computer. I usually combine it with GIMP to make it look better, but I write the image with MyPaint.

[Sasha_Aderolop]

Ubuntu has great Wacom support. It's all plug and play but with great graphical configuration options. You can configure pens and erasers and buttons for all common Wacom tablets. I was even surprised to find that you can lock a tablet to a single monitor in a dual-monitor set-up.

[Linuxratty]

I have a Wacom tablet and it works great with the Gimp. I just plugged it in and it works without a hitch. I've had it for several years and never had a problem with it.

[shuichi]

Well, my experience, after finally buy a my first wacom, on the beggining noting happened and i became desperate, began to look for tutorials but nothing worked, finally just rebooted system and voila! working great in gimp and inkspace, by now im just a little concern about what i was trying before to reboot, but if everything seems right, maybe i didnt touch anything important... just wonder if it happened to some of you in this way, after a reboot.

[cornellg]

My experience is that it has lately become a bit more troubly, but don't let that stop you. I have used an intuos2 and now use an intuos4 L and an intuos5 M. When unity was introduced, programs like Blender, Krita and a few others became a bit cumbersome because lots of cutomizability options disappeared that I needed on a regular basis. I switched to KDE and was surprised at how good that had become. Pretty good support for the tablets too. But with 15.04, plasma is a mess and pain in the bum, so switched back and it isn't as bad as it was a few upgrades ago. To get the most out of the tablets, quite a bit of tinkering is needed, but apart from the LED displays for the buttons, I got everything to work (including modifier key buttons and touch ring switch control), and while unity or whatever it is called nowadays is still getting in the way of other stuff, the tablets are fine. They are definitely worth the money, even if Canonical seems to be partially ignoring the demographic using them.

If you switched from corel and photoshop to Inkscape and Gimp, you should also add Krita to your toolset. Powerful stuff there that the other two are not aiming for. Good luck!

[krikun]

I have Wacom One. And with Ubuntu 14.04LTS it doesn't work correctly. Pressure level is not defined, also buttons on pen don't work as desired (on Windows first button acts like scrolling). So I have bad experience of using Wacom tablet with Ubuntu.