I am using the Lenovo Precision Pen 2. I think you don’t need to pair via Bluetooth. Perhaps you need to switch between tablet and laptop mode by pressing both buttons on the pen for 25 seconds, as written in the manual.
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I am using Metapen M2, and I am happy with it. It uses MPP 2.0, and worked out of the box. The price was perfectly ok as well.
Furthermore, I wanted to do some light sketching (product design), and this was my first try on it. I installed Krita (Win11), but instantly got discouraged by the extremely long opening time. I looked for something more lightweight, and found Concepts, I am very happy with that currently.
Also, Framework Laptop 12 is so much fun to use!!!
I tried it. It’s fine, but I prefer the M2. The M2 is far cheaper, has a built-in magnet, doesn’t have to be manually turned on (though, I suppose the ability to manually turn off the M3 Pro could be seen as a positive), and I prefer the physical button and rear eraser setup on the M2 vs. the multiple taps of a touch-sensitive area on the M3 Pro to activate erase.
If I had to pick one for wobble, I’d say the M3 pro probably has a bit less, but there’s really not much in it.
The M2 has harder tips, the M3 Pro has slightly rubbery tips. In case you have a preference there. In my opinion, if you have a “paperlike” or even a matte screen protector, the harder tip is the way to go. The rubber feels good on smooth glass, but drags a bit too much (In my opinion) on a rougher screen finish.
The USI 2.0 pen has similar performance to the M2, with the same hard tip. But it lacks the magnet, the physical button, and the rear eraser that the M2 has. It’s normally a bit cheaper, so if you don’t care about the extra features, you can save a few bucks. Otherwise, the M2 seems like a slightly better value, given the extra features. Oh, and as far as I know, the USI 2.0 pen doesn’t have tilt support. Can’t confirm, but nothing in the documentation says it has this, while the M2 and M3 Pro both say they have tilt support.
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Tried out my old Lenovo Precision Pen 2 to pretty good results. It feels better than using it on my lenovo tablet lol. I feel it’s pretty decent for non-artist use cases.
Still want the official FW stylus tho…to keep up with the purple setup I have going on.
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I also really like the Lenovo Precision Pen 2. It has a nice form factor, feeling just like a pencil. The accuracy and pressure sensitivity is more than enough, the two buttons work well. It’s not perfect, but more than okay for a non-professional device in this price category. Definitely more than enough to take notes or draw sketches.
I can recommend wearing artists gloves, though, if you’re drawing more elaborate stuff. The palm rejection isn’t perfect and it stops oil/sweat going onto your screen when you rest your palm on the glass.
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multiple people have mentioned the metapen 2, i wanted to add a couple comments about it as a hobbyist artist. most of my digital art experience is with an old intuos that’s been chugging away for at least a decade, so it’s a little difficult for me to tell which annoyances are attributable to the metapen specifically vs the pen technology as a whole (i wish EMR was more widespread!)
- overall less ergonomic than my wacom pen - my wacom has a larger, squishy grip that i find more comfortable. additionally, the metapen’s single side button is more flush with the pen and has more resistance; the wacom’s side buttons are raised and easier (but not too easy) to click. overall using the side button on the metapen interrupts my flow more.
- eraser does also have pressure sensitivity, but i’ve been unable to get it working in ubuntu+krita (i have confirmed it is available in other programs though). so i don’t end up using it as much as i expected.
- the tilt sensitivity is cool. i didn’t have that on my wacom and it is a neat addition for changing size/shape of brush to imitate things like pencil shading and watercolor washes. however the more tilted the pen is the more difficult it is to apply medium/heavy pressure so you may need to really tweak your pressure opacity curves for brushes where you have special tilt behavior.
- palm rejection mostly works but occasionally i zoom out and have a weird line from it failing
not sure if that’s attributable to pen tech, ubuntu’s touchscreen drivers, or what, but it makes me miss EMR lol. - it feels freakishly smooth to me, even though i wore down my intuos many years ago (it only retains the nice texture along the very edges of the drawing surface
). but then again i’m not used to drawing on a screen. i ordered the matte and paperlike viascreens to test out, since people have remarked positively about them but it seemed to be down to personal preference whether the paperlike was a bit too much texture. the shipping is taking ages but i can update once i have them. - latency is good for small and simple brushes. i start getting lag with larger, more complex brushes, but this seems to be CPU-bound (crossing my fingers for “pro” upgrades for the 12” in the future!) - i don’t think the pen is to blame. the “wobble” also wasn’t as bad as i feared - maybe there’s some behind the scenes stabilization i enabled and forgot about but it’s certainly not causing problems for me.
overall opinion: totally good enough for note taking, and it will work for casual drawing. and it’s nice and cheap! but it does start to bother me if it’s more than a couple hours at a time.
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I’m using a Microsoft Surface Pen “Model 1776” a.k.a. “Ver.4” a.k.a “Surface Pen with no clip” and it works fine:
The same unfortunately cannot be said for my FW12’s lid sensor 
(Yes I have tried re-seating that cable; yes I have installed all the drivers; yes I have a thread open with Support lol)
can you tell us which USI / pen controller chip is in the screen? this will help inform us what quality of writing to expect. thanks!
so my experience thus far with USI is that unless it’s reMarkable’s or the Boox Tab XC’s USI, it doesn’t have the resolution or reporting timing to do handwriting particularly well. are you able to get it to resolve small characters like “m” or “h” and get the small curves/loops to work accurately while writing normally?
The touchscreen controller reported on the Framework Laptop 12 is ILIT2901:00 (222A:5539)
others have posted the libinput dump here
as noted in that thread though, it defaults to MPP 2.0 and the Framework pen will switch to whichever the laptop is using (I’ve switched the FW12 back and forth and the pen worked right away after each reboot)
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thanks! this is the first time I’ve heard of a screen being switchable between the two standards tbh. I hope this is indicative of it being fast/accurate enough for quality handwriting; I guess I’ll have to wait for folks to report back re: performance with Xournal++ etc.
Batch 10 user here.
I originally bought the Metapen M2 as a stopgap until the official stylus became available, thinking that it’d be one or two weeks into Q4 at most, seeing as how the stylus was supposed to be “Coming in Q3”.
A week or two into using the M2 for taking notes during lectures, here’s what frustrated me:
-very thin, symmetrical body was uncomfortable to hold
-constantly searching for the side button, since there was a 50% chance that I was holding the pen right side up (the USB-A issue)
-selecting text in Goodnotes by holding down the button while also pushing down on the screen wasn’t exactly ergonomic
-flipping the pen around to erase then back again to write, quickly lost its charm. Especially since:
-The eraser “tip” completely blocks the view of what you’re erasing and often refuses to activate at all when pressing down at an angle.
Long story short, after it became clear that the Framework Stylus wouldn’t be available for quite some time still (five weeks into Q4 now and it’s still out of stock), I returned the M2 and bought the M3 Pro instead.
It fixed all of my issues with the M2 and came with the nice bonus of a slightly rubberized tip which made writing with it less slippery than the hard plastic tip of the M2.
By now, I no longer see a reason to wait for the Framework Stylus, especially since it’d likely be a downgrade to my M3 Pro in a few aspects, but for a higher price.
Yes, shame about the glued in battery and lack of color matching, but at this point I’m over it.
Is there anything special about USI pens to use with the 12? I just got an eiP USI 2.0 Pro and it doesn’t seem to work. I have a RENAISSER Raphael 520C that I use with my Kobo which seems to work fine, but I was hoping for a few more features.
A quick search online seems to show the Renaisser pen as an MPP pen. The FW 12 defaults to MPP 2.0 in the BIOS. You have to switch it from MPP 2.0 to USI 2.0 in the BIOS to use a USI pen. Once the BIOS change is made, it should just work.
Welcome to the community! I hope that helps.
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Is it possible support is distro specific as well? I was expecting this would have fixed it for me, but it didn’t seem to work. I’m using Bazzite.
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It shouldn’t be affected by your Linux distro. At least, not that I’ve seen.
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Stylus support should not be distro dependent. There are various layers where support needs to exist. In order, based on my recollection:
- Linux kernel (drivers).
- The display system (e.g. Xorg device/input drivers/libraries).
System services(I don’t know of any used for styluses).- A user application (e.g. GIMP).
Components of those layers, and possibly in some cases also stylus firmware, each typically have at least a few settings that can be configured through config files or utility programs. Few such settings should have the potential to cause a stylus to not work at all, but some could. Configuration issues are probably most likely to exist on greater numeric (not spatially higher) layers, so I would suggest trouble-shooting the application, then the display system, and so forth.
Most distros include most hardware drivers in their kernel builds and set up their display systems to plug-and-play most hardware. It could be necessary to install some stylus-specific display system components or reconfigure and recompile the kernel, but most likely a non-working stylus is a result of either incorrect settings in or the stylus hardware not being (fully) supported by one of those three layers.
Has anyone been able to compare the FW stylus?
I got mine when they became available but can’t get it to work reliably on Arch linux, any recommendations for others? I saw people talking about the Metapen M2, would this do for art and cad?
You seen my thread here?
I compared the M3 Pro to the FW stylus. Also, see this post by @staticV3 for feedback on the M2:
From what I’ve heard you should be able to do art & CAD work with any of these stylus (M2, M3 Pro, FW stylus). I think it primarily depends on your opinion about the kind of tip (hard / rubber) as well as their respective additional features.
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