I’m not fully sure how to title this, but I thought I’d chronicle my experiences with the FW12 as a note taker and drawing tablet so far.
In my testing, I tried using sway, gnome, and kde plasma as my desktop environments. sway had a crash with a null pointer dereference and really wasn’t touchscreen friendly, and kde plasma had a bizarre issue where stylus events wouldn’t be picked up for about a second. gnome has worked the best by far.
I use rnote for notes, and while it works great most of the time, today I’ve hit an issue where it’ll just stop registering touch events, and requires me using the stylus to get it unstuck. I’ve also found that the onscreen keyboard is hit or miss (mostly miss, I have to force it on most of the time), and gnome will crash when I save a file to my NAS sometimes. I haven’t experience any data loss yet, but it’s still a pain.
Checking the logs it looks like libinput is having a hard time, and I was wondering if anyone else was experiencing friction
Which distro? I’ve tried both a USI and an MPP stylus with debian trixie with gnome as well, and haven’t had too many issues (although there is some weird app-dependent calibration issue sometimes, probably due to scaling). I did apply the same hinge fix that was mentioned for Ubuntu, IIRC.
I tried USI 2.0 and found the pen part of the stylus to be pretty darn reliable. (Bluefin latest) The eraser, though, would move the cursor but wouldn’t erase.
I found Gnome to be the closest to working too. And yeah, the on-screen keyboard definitely needs work. Sometimes it pops up and goes away perfectly and I start relaxing and getting into the zone … and sometimes it gets everything completely wrong and irritates me nonstop.
i have to lay my hand on the screen for support and i find the palm rejection is pretty good, though sometimes i confuse it. i’m hoping some of the issues are resolved when i pick up the framework stylus, 60 bucks isn’t too bad
I’m having this same issue with the framework stylus, bios is set to USI mode, as the stylus advertises working with on the product page. I’m on arch and gnome/wayland, and the stylus slowly gets more and more finicky over time.
This happens to me quite frequently though I’ve sort of gotten used to it. I do wish I could figure out how to fix it since it is quite disruptive. Occasionally touch input just stops working entirely with only stylus input working and I have to restart.
See this thread for comments on touch input not working. I also have seen this behavior on Ubuntu 25.10, typically after using the stylus, then suspending, non-stylus touch no longer works. So far, I’ve found the best fix to be a simple sudo modprobe -r hid_multitouch && sudo modprobe hid_multitouch which unloads and reloads the touchscreen module in the kernel, and touch immediately works again as normal without reboot. Strangely, the touchscreen resumes working even without the reload part, but I re-enable it anyway because that is the default state on Ubuntu. You can check if the driver is loaded using sudo lsmod | grep hid and look for hid_multitouch.
I haven’t gotten comments on whether this “fix” / workaround works for others but it works well for me, so please update if it works on your system!
I believe the “hinge fix” is referring to this, which supposedly makes the on-screen keyboard behave well (on Ubuntu at least). I haven’t needed this fix personally, and seemingly only is necessary for an iio-sensor-proxy version 3.7, fixed in 3.8, details here.