Using a Wacom tablet as a mouse under Wayland – any alternatives to default drivers and OTD?

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Hi everyone,

I recently switched to Fedora 41 and began using the xorg-x11-drv-wacom driver for my Wacom Bamboo CTH-470 tablet under Xorg. Overall, the experience was excellent — everything worked smoothly, especially the stylus and multi-touch support. The only odd issue I ran into was with the tablet buttons: the driver wouldn’t recognize the second button from the top, no matter how I mapped it. Minor, but strange.

Then I upgraded to Fedora 42, a few days before the official release. That’s when I found out that Xorg is no longer offered as a session option by default, which was a bit disappointing — in my case, Xorg worked more reliably.

Under Wayland, I started using the default libwacom/libinput drivers, and things partially improved:

  • The buttons were now correctly recognized, including the one that didn’t work before.
  • Touch input worked great — very responsive and accurate.
  • But the stylus started behaving oddly. Every time I moved the pen and lifted it off the surface, the cursor would disappear. This makes it very hard to use in relative mode (as a mouse replacement), since you lose track of the pointer constantly.

I later found out that this behavior is intentional, as part of Mutter’s design:
:link: Delay the null cursor on prox-out for tablets in relative move (#3169) · Issues · GNOME / mutter · GitLab

Because of this and the limited customization options “out of the box,” I decided to try OpenTabletDriver.

While OTD doesn’t yet support touch input well on Linux, it does handle the stylus and buttons very well, with lots of fine-tuning available. So far, it’s the best balance I’ve found — but still far from perfect.

Has anyone with a similar setup found other drivers or tools that work well under Wayland?

  • Maybe I’ve missed a method to make libinput/libwacom more customizable?
  • Or perhaps there are lesser-known alternatives to OpenTabletDriver?
  • Do driver limitations vary depending on the tablet brand or model? Would switching to a different brand improve compatibility for this use case?
  • Ideally, I’d love to use my tablet with full touch + pen + button support, in relative mode, like a mouse — without having to switch away from Fedora, which otherwise covers all my needs beautifully.

Thanks in advance for any tips or experiences you’re willing to share!
PS: If any of you are experiencing wrist pain after long hours using a mouse, try switching to a pen tablet — it’s a game changer.

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To find the mouse pointer it has a option in the Accessibility section in the Settings. Pointing & Clicking >> “Locate Pointer” It highlights the location if you click the left Ctrl. key. Have a look if this would help you.

As you can imagine, the majority of the users / developers are going for Wayland. Faster changes is the result of it.

But if you really need go back to x11 you can undo the changes made. See topic below:

Removing the x11 session in GDM brought you so far that you also checked out Wayland. This is good and I think on long term the way to go. When ever moving back to x11 remember that this is just temporary available. For this it is important, always to have also a look in Wayland what is going on.

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Hi! Thanks for your response. It’s really interesting to have that option to locate the pointer. Personally, I don’t like that approach — I’d prefer to always have the mouse visible because I’m more used to seeing it all the time. It feels a bit odd having to press CTRL just to find where the mouse is. That said, it’s great to have Wayland as the main focus now, so all improvements will be targeted here. I hope any solution comes, because I would love to use the touchpad in combination with the pen. I was thinking too about getting another model of tablet with better support on Wayland. I really don’t want to go back to X11 since it feels temporary, and I’m looking for the most stable distro possible.

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