I guess avoid Huion if you plan on using wayland
Posted by GodsBadAssBlade@reddit | linux | View on Reddit | 26 comments
I've discussed with Huions support team after adding my experience of a issue in a report to Pop_OS! cosmic repo about huion tablets not working proper(at least the screen versions) and after describing my issues to the customer support team they hit me back with the "just switch to x11, heres how to". I get it. development costs money. but x11 is being phased out by majority of distros, slowly, but surely. Why should anyone invest into huion products if they themselves can't even invest in their own community, sure, majority of their buyers are windows based, but even a slow moving update is better than declaring "just erase your OS and get something that supports it then, silly", and to those who may be thinking "dude just switch to x11" cant, COSMIC only supports wayland, and I've fine tuned my OS to my needs already. I'm not gonna dumb 10s if not 100s of hours of fine tuning for a device. all in all.. yeah, im bitching, but at the same time i think it has at least *some* merits
Flash_Kat25@reddit
If you have a use case that requires x11, just keep using it for now. It's not gone in most distros yet. Genuinely, why do you care more about your display server more than the functionality of physical hardware that you own?
mmstick@reddit
Pen support isn't implemented yet. This is an item for Epoch 2. https://blog.system76.com/post/cosmic-epoch-2-and-3-roadmap
Aegthir@reddit
As others have said, try KDE/Gnome, tablet support for wayland is better there.
ngoonee@reddit
Waawwz,dadzx it
QuackdocTech@reddit
Huion is perfectly supported by libinput. If you are having issues with it, that's a Wayland issue whatever compositor it might be.
"Wayland" is not fine, it's full of these issues. X11 won't die because of issues like these.
Spurgoth@reddit
I've said it before, and I will say it again, wayland is not ready. I'm very casual user and don't do anything super specialised, but every single issue I have had in the last year has been caused or related to wayland.
ngoonee@reddit
You can have an opinion, but this postv doesn't back that up. Huion devices work on Wayland but not in cosmic.
QuackdocTech@reddit
the issue is that Wayland does cause this fragmentation. and this fragmentation does cause issues. It's sad, but it is what it is. This
ancientstephanie@reddit
Wayland moved the responsibility for supporting tablet input from the display server to the compositor. COSMIC doesn't seem to have taken up that responsibility yet.
https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-settings/issues/141
In X11, it's the display server that handles the job, so the functionality isn't restricted by what the desktop environment bothers to support.
Kevin_Kofler@reddit
And that is the proper way to do things: one single place to implement things, hence: works once, works everywhere!
The amount of code duplication between Wayland compositors is insane.
FattyDrake@reddit
The underlying driver code (libinput, libwacom, etc. where the actual support is) are the same between DEs, so that code isn't duplicated. Only how the DE interfaces with libinput changes between each.
Kevin_Kofler@reddit
Still, every compositor has to handle touch input separately, whereas on X11, everything that does not care about the specifics of the pointing device just sees a "mouse" and just works.
FattyDrake@reddit
Drawing tablets are a bit different than touch and Wayland does handle them a LOT better. Drawing tablets were kind of a mess under X11 TBH, a lot more lower level fiddling than was necessary. Things like individual drivers or OpenTabletDriver are no longer necessary. If anything there's less duplication of code now than there was in the past since the low level and kernel stuff is all unified now. The actual implementation is just pushed up to the DE and once they get tablets figured out once they don't have to worry about it again.
Huion does make things difficult by using the same manufactuer and device USB IDs for all their tablets, which requires a separate firmware identifier to have a separate profile added. Once that's determined and added to libwacom they just work. OP's tablet is already supported and works fine on Wayland if tablet support is there and the DE supports tablets.
Responsible-File-420@reddit
well thats pretty frustrating when support basically tells you to abandon your entire setup for their device to work. cosmic is wayland only so their "solution" is literally impossible anyway lol
seems like huion just doesnt want to deal with wayland support which is weird timing since like you said most distros are moving that direction. maybe they figure linux users are small percentage so why bother but then why even advertise linux compatibility in first place
guess its back to shopping for different tablet that actually works with modern linux setups
QuackdocTech@reddit
No one wants to deal with wayland support because it's literally impossible to support wayland. You have to support specific compositors because Wayland is intentionally designed like this.
FattyDrake@reddit
If you use a drawing tablet, best advice is to use a rolling distro to keep your drivers at their newest, stuff is being added and fixed all the time.
Secondly, use a more widely supported DE. KDE snd Gnome have the best tablet support, and while I haven't used it someone mentioned Sway too.
GodsBadAssBlade@reddit (OP)
yeah but aint gnome about to drop x11 for wayland in less than a month from now when ubuntu 26.04 drops? And again, the folks who make the official drivers stated "we don't support wayland, switch to x11" but then again kde is based on wayland aint it? oioioi all the linuxing and what not
KnowZeroX@reddit
Do understand when you contact them, you are talking to level 1 support most of the time that just read off a script and are clueless. Why not load up KDE wayland in a liveusb and try. If not you can use x11 as kubuntu 26.04 will still support x11. That gives you 5 years.
FattyDrake@reddit
I occasionally contribute to libwacom and related hid drivers. They work fine in Wayland as long as they're supported through the libinput stack. Huion doesn't need to support it like they did under X11 because they're mostly working in Wayland.
The problem here is Cosmic and to a similar extent LTS distros. Use Fedora Plasma or Workstation (KDE or Gnome respectively) and there's a good chance your Huion will work. If it doesn't give me the model you're using and I can look into it.
Der_Hampelmann@reddit
As another commenter pointed out cosmic does not have any capability for pen input so you would be out of luck with any tablet. I can vouch for Gnomes Wayland Pen input support it's far better than anything ever was on X11.
GodsBadAssBlade@reddit (OP)
whack, yo
Lousy_Hunter@reddit
Huion works fine on Wayland as long as you use a mature compositor.
I had a Huion Kamvas 24 pro I used on both KDE and Gnome along with my current h610pro I have right now.
hope_dreemur@reddit
Have you tried out OpenTabletDriver? It says your model is supported, you might have some luck there.
https://opentabletdriver.net/
GodsBadAssBlade@reddit (OP)
actuslly yes, Ive been fiddling around with it for a few minutes now and i seem to be too smooth brained to figure it out, I'll see if theres a tutorial video about it here somewhere as it can detect the pen in debug mode but wont use the cursor at all besides clicking the pen to the tablet for left mouse inputs
Klowner@reddit
Which Huion isn't working for ya? I've got a couple and they work fine in Sway (Wayland)
GodsBadAssBlade@reddit (OP)
the Kamvas 16 pro (2020 model, gt-156)