Why Drawing Tablet Brands Won't Collaborate on Linux Floss Drivers

https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1154/why-drawing-tablet-brands-wont-collaborate-on-linux-floss-drivers

by Tomte • 1 month ago

233 113 1 month ago

ndiddy• 1 month ago

Well, because it's true: many of the repositories are named after "Wacom". It's a historical legacy on GNU/Linux. It's also a decade-long debate that these repos should be renamed differently.

If the project being named after Wacom is actively causing other companies to not contribute because they believe it’s a Wacom lead project and they’d be helping a competitor, I don’t understand why this is even a debate vs. just changing the name to something vendor neutral.

otikik3• 1 month ago

Yes. It feels like the article was leading towards a reason for not doing that, but then suddenly it just ends.

yk• 1 month ago

Pretty sure the reason is, that anybody who could actually do the changes thinks works for me, the alternative is a lot of work for little technical gain.

And besides once you start your tablet for Linux Projekt you have to touch everything, so that is a nice opportunity to finally refactor the wacom_debug_2 mess and pretty soon you're drowning in yak shavings.

burnte6• 1 month ago

And it's been a decade long argument? Sounds like someone is just emotionally attached to something not changing. Those are the hardest problems to solve.

KaiserPro• 1 month ago

Name changes are controversial. Nothing gets nerds going more than changing a project name so companies work better with OSS.

myrmidon2• 1 month ago

Not necessarily.

The technical people managing the repos might just be opposed to name changing in general (seeing how a boatload of links, references, documentation would require updating, some of which you don't even control), and meanwhile those people might feel the "misbranding" drawbacks much less (if at all).

jrm44• 1 month ago

Preach. And it's a disease.

Signed, the guy who will forever believe GIMP could have been a contender with a name change decades ago.

MomsAVoxell2• 1 month ago

Its most likely a debate because making such a major refactoring effort is actually a heavy work load, there are lots of bits and pieces to tie together and cut out and so on, and the folks capable of shepherding this change through all the parties out into the distro's are already underpaid/under-appreciated too much as it is ..

Hopefully, this situation will get some traction with a bit of noise about it, and the distros can actually put some effort into handling the rename - or maybe a hero will arise in the midst of all the fuss, who just does the full renaming properly, tested, and so on - in a fashion that it simply can't be ignored.

It's definitely an interesting thing to see this happening, anyway. Open Source has many, many troublesome facets when it comes to fairness and equity, but it also has a lot of bright, shining moments. The fact that the technical ability to build these drivers is already a given, and really the thing holding everything back is just the corporate brand obsession, is kind of hilarious though, also.

Duh, you own your competitor by pushing your tech into their brand-space, dummies. This is an opportunity for brands-not-Wacom to eat Wacoms lunch in a delightfully technologically significant way - but, alas, the brand cult reared its maw, instead...

chadgpt32• 1 month ago

I think it makes them own you - a little. You look subsidiary to Wacom.

LocalH2• 1 month ago

Devil's advocate: why should the project have to rename because some companies want them to? That just shifts the window slightly closer to corporate control, something that millions of people worldwide bemoan.

exe34• 1 month ago

More importantly, why would other companies offer free support for something that will garner free advertising for a competitor?

sib• 1 month ago

I mean, if you look at it that way, it's already named 100% after a single company...

fouc• 1 month ago

fork and rename the https://github.com/linuxwacom/wacom-hid-descriptors project, strip all wacom references. then share w/ the other tablet brands. problem solved.

__mharrison__2• 1 month ago

Name it something really confusing like... Linuxtablet

inigyou3• 1 month ago

or Drawing Tablet Drivers for Linux

but open source will never have such sensible names. It'll probably be called something like Ujagu Flemble or Bananahead.

dd8601fn• 1 month ago

Or, as is tradition, something stupid like “the gimp” or “go”.

toomim• 1 month ago

Good point. You don't even need to rename the upstream project. Just create a new project, and get the code there. Since it's open source, it will eventually make its way into the upstream libwacom as well.

abdullahkhalids• 1 month ago

Besides Wacom, which tablets would you recommend as good quality?

giancarlostoro2• 1 month ago

This entire debacle just screams only use Wacom since they're the only ones making their hardware usable on Linux.

Palomides2• 1 month ago

quite happy with huion on linux

fl4regun• 1 month ago

huion and Xp-Pen are pretty good. I've had both working well on linux computers as well.

Macha• 1 month ago

I updated from a screenless Wacom to an XP-Pen screen tablet. The tablet hardware itself is good (but also I moved up several product categories) for less money than the Wacom, but the experience getting it to work on Linux was reminiscent of trying to get wifi to work 15 years ago. I got there in the end, but it was not smooth.

klondike_klive• 1 month ago

I use an Xppen 24" Pro display tablet. I enjoy using it but my Linux mint machine simply won't boot with it plugged in. I haven't figured out a workaround beyond physically disconnecting both cables every time. And when I boot up and reconnect, my machine never remembers the screen mapping, so there's enough friction there for me to avoid plugging it in for days if not weeks at a time.

dtn• 30 days ago

I'm using a screen XP-Pen 24" Gen 2 on Arch+Wayland+KDE right now, it has been a much better experience than on Windows. The tablet worked flawlessly out of the box.

However, there aren't any drivers for the included remote, and to calibrate the tablet itself you'll need to use OpenTabletDriver.

AlienRobot2• 1 month ago

One thing I miss from Windows is the tablet driver GUI. "cinnamon-settings wacom" doesn't let me map buttons to keys (important for software like FireAlpaca, which pans with the space key instead of supporting the middle mouse button like everybody else in the planet), and it also doesn't let me remap the tablet area to arbitrary screen coordinates. These are things I could do on Windows that I can't do through the GUI.

I wrote a Python script to do it using xsetwacom, but I don't know if it would work for anybody else. I don't know if xsetwacom is only for wacom tablets, or if xsetwacom is only for X11 (I'm not on Wayland yet).

nosioptar• 1 month ago

xsetwacom does not work with Wayland. I doubt it ever will. Someone could probably build a similar tool that does work with Wayland.

It's just another reason why Wayland isn't ready for daily use.

Palomides2• 1 month ago

have you tried OpenTabletDriver?

AlienRobot2• 1 month ago

Yes, but if I remember correctly I ran into some issues with it. It's been a long time ago so I don't remember what those issues were.

egypturnash2• 1 month ago

It’s not like they collaborate on closed-source drivers either. If you have two different brands of tablets in your life then you get to deal with weird bugs from their drivers fighting. And if you’re on Windows they may fight with MS’ attempt at default drivers, too.

giancarlostoro2• 1 month ago

Feel free to reply to that email and let them know that your readers just discovered that instead of considering Wacom alternatives, they now believe that Wacom is the only brand they can use on Linux. It seems like the only valid response to that is to give money to the people who make their hardware usable on my software.

vachina2• 1 month ago

The venn diagram for Linux user and an artist is so small they probably wouldn’t bother.

You can continue to use Wacom (only)

5G_activated• 1 month ago

The point is to get artists to use free software, or enable them to have an alternative to Windows or macOS.

so-rose• 30 days ago

The venn diagram for Linux user and an artist is so small they probably wouldn’t bother. > > You can continue to use Wacom (only)

You might be surprised. On the smaller scale, look no further than Blender and Krita: Their stats indicate plenty of artists using Linux to sculpt and paint, with tablets.

But it's "big serious business" too. As evidence, see the VFX Reference Platform (https://vfxplatform.com/), a baseline for artist workstations with plenty of industry backing (vendors involved include Autodesk, Foundry, and Side-Effects; stakeholders include the Visual Effects Society and, it seems, the Academy Software Foundation). It adapts to direct studio feedback, which is certainly not an exercise in charity, and I guarantee you that they all want tablets to work as well.

Anecdotally, I've heard that big shops in-house a lot of their tools, and do so for Linux. The reasons I've heard being control & ease of integration with all the bespoke petabyte-scale server-based automation pipelines, which are most certainly Linux.

kouteiheika2• 1 month ago

Well, because it's true: many of the repositories are named after "Wacom". It's a historical legacy on GNU/Linux. It's also a decade-long debate that these repos should be renamed differently.

Okay... let's rename them then? I know it's silly, but, well, we've went through the whole pointless `master` -> `main` branch rename in so many projects which was much more disruptive -- at least this one could serve a purpose?

cortesoft• 1 month ago

I find it interesting that you think this rename serves a purpose when the master to main rename does not.

Neither change has any technical reason. The only reason why either name change was desired is because some contributors were upset by the names.

pmontra2• 1 month ago

I'm entering troubled waters but hey... The master to main issue is an accident of the history of the USA, still unresolved in its consequences, when most of the world was not practicing slavery anymore. The typical reaction outside the USA is rolling eyes and hope that all the ethnic groups inside the USA will finally get along. If the IT and economic powerhouse of the world were India instead of the USA and Indians would have picked master instead of main despite the British colonial period, this would be a non-issue: the USA could use a different convention (like for units of measurement) and the rest of the world wouldn't notice.

BTW, every country had its expansionist and genocidal and slavery moments (I'm from Italy, think about the Roman expansion inside Italy, then the empire or our colonial wars 100 years ago.) The USA is one of the most recent examples. It takes time and I understand that master vs main is important inside the country.

The issue of Wacom branding is different because it's a business dynamic and businesses don't want to work for competitors no matter the country, no matter the history. They can work together or an equal footing. So rename to libtablet or whatever.

wpm2• 1 month ago

The difference I think is that it is reasonable for a company to not want to bother working in a project named after their competitor, when "master" has always had multiple meanings from "formal title for a young boy" to "really experienced tradesperson" to "authoritative record" and it is somewhat unreasonable to associate "authoritative record" with "slave master", especially since git branches were rarely named "slave". Wacom is a brand that hasn't been Xerox'ed or Kleenex'd or Band-aided. I don't call every drawing tablet a Wacom.

kouteiheika2• 1 month ago

Neither change has any technical reason. The only reason why either name change was desired is because some contributors were upset by the names.

Indeed, neither has any technical reason.

I suppose you're right that both changes have a purpose -- one could feasibly convince a company to contribute Linux drivers (a net win for everyone), and the other is a constant annoyance which wastes everyone's time (is this project using `main`, or `master` -- you never know, so have fun getting it wrong all the time) just to allow certain groups of people/corporations to virtue signal**.

** -- If "master" is such a naughty word then where are all of the people getting offended by e.g. "Mastercard", "Ticketmaster", "Master Lock", "MasterBrand", and many other company/product names, and why those names aren't getting changed? Why there isn't any outrage about them? My point here is not to engage in whataboutism, but just to point out that the word isn't actually offensive when used in a non-offensive manner, and virtually no one is actually genuinely upset about it.

chrismorgan2• 1 month ago

When I started using a graphics tablet, long ago, I was confused about why all this stuff was labelled Wacom, and whether it was applicable to me or not, when using a device of another brand. Some parts of it seemed to be, and other parts didn’t? It was very confusing, and a genuine confusion that made me uncertain even in purchasing. (It would be less confusing now because user-facing parts don’t touch the “Wacom” name as much any more.)

Whereas the “master” thing was transparent linguistic nonsense and a strictly-US cultural thing that a few people foisted on the rest of the world because they decided to get offended on behalf of a hypothetical group.

lelanthran• 1 month ago

Neither change has any technical reason.

This does - few companies want to get into a trademark suit. "Avoiding trademark infringement" is a technical reason.

TekMol3• 1 month ago

Could AI do it?

Would it work to give the Windows driver to an LLM and tell it to analyze it and write a Linux driver?

fooker• 1 month ago

It's funny to see the downvotes here.

Maybe people don't realize that this is very much within the capabilities of modern AI nowadays?

At $dayjob we have encountered people reverse engineering our driver with Claude and creating GitHub repos with pretty useful vibecoded tools and documentation.

Yes, the raw binaries of the driver. Not leaked source code or anything like that.

nitwit0053• 1 month ago

The open source maintainers won't have the Windows source, unless it's given to them.

TekMol3• 1 month ago

I meant the binary.

With enough patience and spit it should be possible to understand it. And AI can do it while we sleep.

dooglius• 1 month ago

Presumably GP means from the binary form

WillAdams• 1 month ago

For my part, I've been using Wacom tablets and styluses and digitizers since placing a same day order (2AM) w/ PC Warehouse using their 1-800 number, paying for rush shipping and getting a Wacom ArtZ later that same day.

I've suffered through a lot of non-Wacom EMR styluses in the past, and my preference is to buy the real thing, so I'm okay with the status quo, unless there has been a marked improvement --- that said, who wants multiple stylus technologies? A big improvement in my life was getting the same Wacom EMR support on _all_ of my devices, so I can:

- make a note in MyScript Notes on my Samsung Galaxy Note 10+

- add it into a to-do notebook on my Kindle Scribe Colorsoft

- open the note in Nebo.app on my Samsung Book 3 Pro 360 for reference/editing

- work on the project on my MacBook using a Wacom One display

(and yes, there are times when I have all four devices out)

I couldn't count how many Wacom EMR styluses are scattered around my house or in various laptop bags....

pellmellism• 1 month ago

lol banana slice

edg5000• 1 month ago

All they have to do is publish a technical PDF with descriptors and stuff. That's it. Why not ask for that? They should see the benefit of their product "just working" with FOSS systems.

greatgib• 1 month ago

To me, this response shows that there is a great opportunity to convince them with things that will bring them good publicity. Things like "drivers" with their name, etc...

edflsafoiewq• 30 days ago

"Oh gee, we'd definitely contribute to the open source driver if the repo name didn't have wacom in it." Yeah, uh huh.

Why Drawing Tablet Brands Won't Collaborate on Linux Floss Drivers

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