Kde wayland for artists

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Introduction

This page is to document information regarding various artists workflows under KDE Wayland. It goal is to help artists ascertain what is currently possible and what is in the works.

Graphic Tablet support under wayland

The graphic tablets support is provided by the Linux kernel and libinput is the library which primarily helps desktop environments as a medium to configure and use input devices on them. There is not need to install xf86-input-wacom like you do on xorg or any other package, most probably your distribution will ship libinput and it will recognize your tablet. If your tablet is not supported by libinput then you might have luck trying out third party user space utilities like Open Tablet Driver.

That said most of the tablets from Wacom and Huion have good support on Linux.

If you are satisfied with the default configuration like pressure curves, shortcut mapping for pen buttons then you do not have to do anything but use the tablet.

If you need any configuration then KDE plasma has a new KCM for tablet. It provides a page in the systemsettings application on for configuring your graphic tablet. It is now a part of plasma desktop package here.

This new KCM has half of the configuration options and others are still not implemented. Below is a screenshot of how it look as of 30 November 2023 under plasma wayland

What Works for Graphic tablets

  • Setting orientation of the tablet
  • Mapping portion or whole of the screen(monitor) to tablet
  • Setting keyboard shortcuts combination (no single modifiers or mouse buttons presses) to the tablet and pen buttons
  • Switching between left handed mode and Right handed mode
  • Setting a target Display

What is yet to be implemented

  • 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
  • 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 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.

Color management Support

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