Hi, I have a Chromebook that I put pmOS on and I plan to use it as a drawing tablet with krita, so I bought a USI pen and it’s not yet working properly, very likely because the device is just a little quirky.
In the drawing tablet settings when the pen is set to pen mode, the pointer actually shows up at the spot where I hold the pen, which is great. But the pointer is a thin cross (or plus?) and nothing happens when I tap it on any button and it doesn’t draw in krita.
When I set it to mouse mode, I can click on stuff, but because the device is quirky like that, the orientation is messed up and no combination of the orientation and mapped area modes in the drawing tablet display settings produces the desired result.
Also, I think palm rejection may be working a little too well or something else is going on, because after I use the pen, I have a hard time getting the touchscreen to work again.
I use a Lenovo Ideapad Duet
Operating System: postmarketOS edge
KDE Plasma Version: 6.5.3
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.19.0
Qt Version: 6.10.0
Kernel Version: 6.12.57-mt81 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 4 × ARM Cortex-A53, 4 × ARM Cortex-A73
Memory: 3.8 GiB of usable RAM
Graphics Processor 1: Mali-G72
Graphics Processor 2: Mali-G72 (idk whyit thinks it has 2 GPUs…)
Product Name: MediaTek krane sku176 board
Okay, I just live booted pmOS with gnome and it works. Gnome also doesn’t seem to have some of the other weird issues that I have on plasma on this device specifically and have yet to write a bug report about.
That is so sad, I suspect they ship it with the workarounds that gnome needs and either they don’t do that for plasma, or the workarounds required for gnome are what fs up plasma. Because I also suspect that pmOS doesn’t really care about the plasma desktop all that much. I don’t think I can get another distro to even boot though.
Edit: I don’t dislike or disrespect pmOS, I think what they do is really cool. Plasma desktop not being a priority just kind of makes sense - pmOS is mostly for phones which is not the kind of form factor you want to use plasma desktop on and alpine, which pmOS is based on, is mostly for headless or low powered devices where lxqt or xfce makes more sense. Additionally, both are AFAIK relatively low manpower volunteer driven projects
We do have a few bugs/things I plan on fixing that relate to configuring the orientation of the drawing tablet, I think this is one of the few real cases where this just completely fails. I highly doubt its actually related to pmOS specifically, and more likely our fault.
I can use the pen in krita when I fullscreen krita. Not ideal, but I could live with that, if I could also find a solution to the touchscreen no longer working until reboot as soon as I have used the pen once.
Outside of that I just noticed that whenever I lift the pen, the cursor returns to the same upper right corner. Idk if that tells anyone anything.
Also, when it works, it’s pretty amazing. I didn’t expect it to be this good.
Update: I found a debian trixie based image for my device and the pen works properly and doesn’t break touch.
There’s no pen vs mouse mode selection, but mouse mode doesn’t really make sense for when you’re drawing directly on the display anyway, so I assume it’s supposed to be this way.