My new test station for graphic pen tablet on Linux

Okay, I know: the photo may not make you dream: but this is my first test bench dedicated to Linux graphics tablets, and it's a big change for me.

It's all in my garage, and it allows me to stop doing the kind of tinkering that breaks my main production operating systems on my desk at home (my catstation). It's a plan to have fewer boxes, hardware, and wires everywhere while I'm drawing comics, and still have a test bench ready to go. I had to go through some sick decluttering, yak shaving and be clever with my storage space to dedicate this little corner to this exclusive use: it's not very big at home.

That's why I had to share this photo and this news with you. It is still reduced to the strictly functional: a desk and a bunch of graphics tablets that I had in stock and accumulated over the years.

Hardware

For this first version, the machine is currently a Purism Librem 13 (2018), which has been retired after years of faithful service (replaced by my two-in-one tablet, a Lenovo Yoga 370, which I use when traveling). The system is mainly KDE Neon, the developer edition, Plasma 6 and Wayland.

Among the tablets shown in the photo (top left to bottom right):

• Wacom Intuos Pro L
• Wacom Bamboo Fun Medium
• Gaomon M10K 2018
• Wacom Intuos 3 Large
• Wacom Intuos 4 Medium
• Huion WH1409 (v1)
• Wacom Cintiq 13HD (plugged)

Off-camera (because very large):

• XP-Pen Artist 24 Pro
• Wacom Intuos Pro 4 XL

My latest XPPen Artist Pro 16 (Gen 2) is still the one I use full time on my desk at home, for this reason I'm going to plug it very occasionally to test.

You can find tests about these graphic pen tablets on the hardware tag of my blog.

The goal of the setup:

The primary goal of this setup will be to test how to setup these graphic pen tablets on GNU/Linux, using only free/libre software solutions.

I'll mainly test the Plasma 6 desktop under Wayland, in different scenarios: different ratios, different drivers, different buttons, and different pressure curves. I'll also test other aspect as color calibration, Krita packages, etc...

This will also allow me to test and give feedback on features as they are developed, on a system that's very unstable because it's full of work-in-progress code.

It's a one hundred percent volunteer beta testing effort to help the developers get through a couple of crises: packaging, Wayland, graphic tablet drivers. Unfortunately, this continues to scare off and confuse newcomers, a situation I've described in detail in this article.

Future improvements:

It's still early days, but it's a start. If the setup proves useful and becomes practical, I plan to improve the storage of the tablets: wall hangers, pen holders, packaging and plastic boxes to help preserve them, a better PC for testing, and an improved work environment.

Time investment

This is a background task, of course, spread out over the weeks, an hour here, an hour there. You get the idea. My priority and my working hours at the moment are completely consumed by the creation of the Mini Fantasy Theater website. CSS, PHP, theming, parser, bug fixing... nothing exciting to show and it takes so long!

After that, I'd like to start producing the last episodes of Pepper&Carrot. I don't think my scenario for the last arc (episode 39, 40, 41 and 42) will have a better rewrite than what I've explored over the last month. It's really time to put it down on paper, but I'll have more details on this plan in a blog post later.

Update 2024-09-24: After two month, my setup revealed to be a failure... I spent consistently, weekly, on each wednesday, 1h in front of it: ready to make some testing and I tested so few things. But most of my time went into fighting with the installation of the beta-testing environment: KDE Neon Unstable. In front of so many frustration, I'll probably dismantle it. You can read more detail about it here.