Drawing Tablets on KDE Plasma Wayland

(Updated on 2024/12/09)

This website tracks the status of using a digital drawing tablet in the KDE Plasma Wayland session. These devices are used for drawing, photography, sculpting or anything else that needs a fine stylus input. While drawing tablets already work in the Wayland session, whether it currently supports your specific workflow depends.

This page also serves as a "HOW-TO" guide on transferring your old X11 setup to Wayland, and some differences between the two.

This page is only relevant for KDE Plasma 6. This page refers to "KCM" a lot, this refers to the settings pages available in System Settings.

Existing Features

These are the features that exist today in Plasma 6.2:

Upcoming Features

These features are in our immediate plans or are already being worked on, and should be released within the year. These are sorted in no particular order.

Features in 6.3

These features have been merged already, and will appear in the upcoming KDE Plasma 6.3 release:

Planned Features

These features are planned but are not guaranteed to be implemented. No timeline is promised on these tasks either. These are sorted in no particular order.

Funding

A question we get asked often is whether or not we accept funding for developing these features. The answer is not at the moment - we aren't set up for that. You can donate to the greater KDE fund which will indirectly reimburse our contractors and possible travel expenses. Individuals working on these features may accept donations, but this isn't specifically in return for working on said features.

Some of this work is funded by NLNet. If you appreciate that, consider contacting them or screaming it from the rooftops that their funding is making a difference for you.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Krita and other art programs even work under Wayland? Does it matter if they're running under XWayland?

Yes, all of your existing art programs that you used under the X11 session will still work under Wayland. Krita is known to work despite only running through XWayland.

If you encounter a situation in which these programs do not work correctly or match their X11 behavior under Wayland, that's most likely a bug and should be reported to bugs.kde.org. It's very rare that it's the application's fault.

Why isn't my tablet supported? Nothing useful shows up under the KCM.

This can be due to many reasons, but the most likely is that your tablet needs lacks support in the Linux kernel. Do not expect solutions which existed under X11 to work.

In the worst case scenario, look up your tablet manfacturer and see if they provide their own proprietary driver. XP-PEN's Linux driver is known to work under Wayland. It's also worth looking up your tablet name plus "Linux Wayland" to see if there's any existing solutions.

The unfortunate truth is that there's nothing we can do on our side to improve things. If you know someone who does freelance Linux kernel development and could work on upstreaming support for more devices, let me know on Mastodon and I can shout them out here.

Some features don't seem to work, or nothing happens when I'm pressing my stylus buttons. What gives?

See the answer above.

Am I really out of luck if my tablet is not supported?

As mentioned before, your tablet manufacturer may have a driver you can use. You can also look at the DIGImend project and OpenTabletDriver for alternative solutions. Note that if you use a userspace driver, only configure it in one place (e.g. don't configure it in OpenTabletDriver and the KCM at the same time.)

The Wayland session does not support X/Y/Z feature I need!! How do I contact someone to suggest adding it?

I suggest reading over this page entirely and make sure your feature is actually implemented or may no longer be needed. If that doesn't apply and the feature request is valid, please file a bug on bugs.kde.org under the systemsettings Product and the kcm_tablet Component so it shows up in the relevant person's inbox.

What is the state of color management under Wayland? Should I be using it if I need color management for my job?

The KDE Wayland Session does support color management.

The catch is that very few (if any) applications take advantage of it yet. And more work is required to streamline processes like color calibration with a colorimeter and such.

If you require color management right now, you will have use the X11 session. But I suggest keeping tabs on KDE Plasma releases for improvements in this area.

OK, but can I at least profile under Wayland? Does my colorimeter work like it did under X11?

Yes! See this guide by one of the KWin maintainers for a tutorial. It's still a bit rough around the edges, but is known to work. Note that the statements above still apply.

I'm not a programmer. How can I still help to improve the Wayland session?

The easiest way is to boot into the Wayland session and stretch your legs out. It's OK if it doesn't work exactly right the first time - we want to know every small bump in your road to adopting the session. Report any issues you see that can be fixed on our side.

If you've already battle-tested the KDE Plasma provided by your distribution and excited for the new features we're working on, you can boot into KDE Neon Unstable Edition to test the unreleased features listed above.

Transitioning to Wayland

Switching to the Wayland Session

To use the Wayland session, log out and choose the "KDE Plasma (Wayland)" session in the bottom left session chooser.

When you log back in, you will be booted into Wayland!

If such an option is not available - like on Fedora - then you may already be booted into Wayland (check KInfoCenter) or the Wayland session is not available for your distribution. Check your distribution's documentation for more details.

Make Sure You're Up To Date

Before reporting issues or missing features in the Wayland session, make sure you're using the absolutely latest KDE Plasma. The latest version is displayed on our website if you're unsure. We add and fix features constantly, so it's important you're on a distribution that provides the latest KDE Plasma such as Fedora KDE.

Configure Using the KCM First

Previous settings from applications like xsetwacom or the Wacom Tablet KCM will not carry over to the KDE Wayland Session. Before you continue, check if you can configure everything you need under the KCM. If not, the rest of the guide may still be helpful to you.

Replace xsetwacom with ktabletconfig

If your previous X11 setup required a tool like xsetwacom to perform some configuration, I created ktabletconfig to fill it's place as it does not work under the Wayland session.

Your previous scripts do need adaption, and some features are not yet implemented as the tool is still new.

Unsupported Options

Some options such as Suppress and RawInput used to control the event flow under X11, do not exist under libinput. Smoothing is done on the libinput level and currently cannot be manually turned off. libinput tries to performs some heuristics to turn it off when necessary, such as for AES pens.

If libinput decides to create an option, we can add that to the KCM. But it's currently out of scope until that's implemented upstream.

Technical Differences from X11

There are a few differences to note, which can help explain why everything changed. First of all: the older "Wacom Tablet" KCM is not used for technical reasons, and it's replaced by the Wayland-only "Drawing Tablet" KCM so features need to be re-implemented. Secondly, the X server is not responsible for translating device events and instead that's a task left up to libinput (for non-technical users, one of the layers below KDE Plasma but above the kernel.) This is in contrast to the X11 session, where this was the job of input drivers like xf86-input-wacom (unless you used xf86-input-libinput of course!)

In simple terms, this means most of the emphasis is libinput and the kernel - hence why they're mentioned so much on this page :-)

Maintained by Joshua Goins. This page is manually updated, contact me if something is out of date or incorrect.