Does anyone have experience with XPPEN tablet drivers on Linux? Do they provide the same fuctionality as the Windows and MacOS ones?

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Greetings Fellow Humans, Human fellas!

Long time no see here!

I’m slowly learning 2D digital drawing. Now that I’m finally graduating highschool, I thought it would be time to upgrade my 7 year old Wacom Bamboo tablet.

The tablets I am considering are the XPPEN Deco, Pro Medium, Deco 03, the Deco 02V2, and if non of those have proper driver support, the Wacom Intuous Pro(37USD WTF).

What I want to know is that do the included drivers have support for custom key bindings for the buttons and dials these tablets come with?

Are there any feature omissions they have compared to the Linux Wacom Project, which has full control over the tablet?

Finally, does the wireless bluetooth mode for the Deco 03 work on Linux?

I can’t seem to find any relevant information about these questions on the web. I’ve sent an email to XPPEN but they haven’t responded yet.

If anyone has answers to this question, I would love to hear them! I seriously do not want to spend the high price of the Wacom Tablet.

Thanks you all for helping me.

Happy holidays and stay safe.

Edit: XPPEN Finally answered my questions and told me that most if not all functions of the windows drivers are all included in the XPPEN Linux drivers.

The AUR drivers are the old ones.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tf_1ajHVwLUdaMKoSKw1LmNGJ3F760IT/view
here is the new one. Though, I’m not sure why this is in a Gdrive on not found in the website.

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Hello,

As digital “artist” myself i investigate the support for tables on linux for quite some time, and it seems that DIGImend - Tablets has a decent list you can investigate about in detail, and is actively developed so for sure more will be added there.
To install it you need this package from AUR
AUR (en) - digimend-drivers-git-dkms
and of course you will need the linux headers for your running one before that.

Best to try to find some answers on issue pages of diginmed github

There is a driver offered for Deco 03 on their official page
https://www.xp-pen.com/download-299.html
but without the hands on the tablet is hard to say how it performs and if all features will be available under linux.

Have a look at this topics:

And this one has a couple of links that for sure will be helpful

Also, depending on your preferred DE, some things might be straight forwards, or might require additional tweaking, or as presented in the last link, a standalone UI.

For now the Wacom tablets seem to be more easier to set up and use in KDE Plasma and Gnome, as have a slightly better support, but indeed are a bit more expensive due to their battery free Stylus technology. :slight_smile:

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Thanks for thr heads up and resources! I’ll be sure to read through them 1 by 1.

All the XPPens I’ve listed here have official drivers for Linux in the AUR and on their website. I’m just paranoid that the drivers might not have keybinding support. I don’t like the default binding they come with.

Also, they all have battery free styluses.

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Good to see that is no longer the case to be only available on wacom models. Was not the case some time ago. :slight_smile:

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The future is now old man. Haha. Edited post. All keybindings and dials work with the drivers says an XPPEN representative.https://drive.google.com/file/d/1e8J3pQQCnoXQAi2bp98IpsDORBpP-PPh/view?usp=sharing

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Indeed i didn’t check their products lineup in quite some time now, till today. Quite impressive switch, and the fact that they actually give more specific linux drivers for each of their products is a big plus, and more than that, the fact that you got a reply from them shows they do a greater job than before and also better than their competitors.
Marked your answer as solution, so peple that are interested to find it.
Happy drawing, young talent ! :smiley:

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Now this is weird.

When I contacted XP-Pen. They game me a link to a gDrive archive of the XP-Pen tablet driver.

The driver is a .sh installer and uninstaller.

From the UI, this looks like the newly redesigned UI. We will call this driver the “New UI Driver”

The weird thing here is that this driver is nowhere to be found on the XP-PEN website.

On the XPPEN Website, they provide 2 drivers for linux. A standard driver, and a beta driver.

The standard driver does not install a new program. The .SH file just runs the driver. From the looks of it, the driver is only enabled when the the .SH file is running in the background. This is the same driver as the one in the AUR. Though the AUR version breaks my Kvantum theme. It says something about QT path not set blah blah blah. Thankfully though, the AUR version seems to properly install the driver as an application.

The beta driver doesn’t even run.

I’ve asked XP-Pen about why the New UI Driver is not available on the website, and when the New UI Driver will be available on the website.

I will update you guys when XPPEN responds.

TO BE CONTINUED.

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There is more to this Saga. You might want to check it out. I’ve updated this stuff in another comment.

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