I have a cheapie USI 2.0 stylus from amazon, and while I’ve gotten the main drawing function working perfectly well on the 12 in Fedora Workstation (Gnome-Wayland), I can’t get either of the buttons to work with it. It’s so bad that when I use Gnome’s tablet test function and I use the eraser button, it crashes settings entirely. This issue has persisted across my original install, a switch to KDE-Plasma, and then a completely fresh install of Fedora Workstation.
Before I go throwing money at the problem and potentially still having it, I wanted to check if anyone else has encountered this issue and solved it, or if they have a USI 2.0 pen whose buttons do work with Fedora that doesn’t cost too much.
Updating this a bit. I was able to get ahold of a friend’s MPP stylus and it seems to work fine, button, eraser, and all. I’m going to see if I can find another USI stylus to try with it, but if nothing else, I at least know something i can buy (Metapen M2 MPP version). Going to continue trying to get the USI 2.0 one to work for now.
Further documenting here, in case it helps someone else.
Fedora 42 uses the package libwacom in order to process tablet input. Framework 12 screen is registered as a tablet in /usr/share/libwacom/framework-laptop12.tablet which seems to function as a config file for it, defining the functions it has access to. (You may need to install libwacom-utils and run libwacom-update-db for these files to generate. I’m playing around with different configuration settings in that file to see if I can get the eraser to properly behave. I haven’t found documentation on the config file’s functions and variables yet, so i’m limited to what I can observe from other .tablet files in that directory.
Additionally, I figured out why Fedora was behaving so weirdly. I incorrectly assumed that it listed two styluses in settings>Graphics Tablets as a compromise to make the dual function USI/MPP screen work. In fact, it seems that the pen tip and the pen eraser are picked up by the system as two different styluses. I think if I can figure out how to rebind the output from the "Eraser Stylus”, then that will solve my issue for the most part.
Alright, I’ll mark my issue as Solved now. What fixed it for me was going to the aforementioned framework-laptop12.tablet file and changing the line Styli=@generic-no-eraser;to Styli=@generic-with-eraser;to match the pen I was using, and then running libwacom-update-db. After that it behaved correctly with most applications, and let me know that some of the problems are application based.
I’ll still need to rebind the input for the remaining apps, but it works for now.
Lol, thanks, even though I spent most of the time doing rubber duck problem solving, I figured having it all here would be helpful if anyone else finds the same issue. I came across too many reddit posts with possible solutions outright removed.