Wacom tablet pen as mouse, Fedora 43, Wayland

Ask Fedora
1

I use a Wacom tablet pen as my “mouse”, for efficient 1:1 pen position to screen position input, and to avoid wrist problems.

Up until Fedora 42 I could use X11, which with a few xinput tweaks worked nicely for me. There was only one cursor, and the pen buttons could be used for right clicks.

Now with Fedora 43 it seems I have to use Wayland. This introduces the concept of two cursors, a “mouse” one and a “tablet” one. Which causes all sorts of problems if I want to use my tablet pen as the “mouse” and the tablet touch as a scroll pad.

KDE Plasma seems to have more control over the tablet settings, but I get a lot of crashes in programs like Vivaldi when I try to scroll using the touchpad.

GNOME is more reliable, but has fewer settings and some settings simply don’t work. I can turn off “tap to click” but tapping the tablet still sends a click event. Mouse-right from the pen buttons works randomly, and doesn’t work for gestures or contextual menus in Vivaldi.

Searching suggests that installing different tablet drivers might help, and that work is possibly being done to have an option to combine the two cursors into a single “mouse”.

Anyone got any tips?

2

There are spins that use Xorg. I have cinnamon on an old imac.

Consider other pointing devices that work with Wayland. Many colleagues had RSI issues and also spent time in research vessels so needed pointing devices that could be fixed in place with duct tape: https://seatronx.com/pointing-devices-for-marine-use/. We had a collection of such devices people could try to see which were comfortable. Check for organizations in your area that have collections of pointing devices available for finding which you can use.

3

Thank you for the tips, but I’ve used Fedora and GNOME for years now, along with Wacom tablets for decades. The 1:1 relationship between pen position and mouse cursor position makes my work very efficient. No shuffling needed :slight_smile:

There is no reason why Wayland couldn’t work the same way as X11 does, for this use case. I’ll keep looking for ways to fix the problem.