I've used Linux on various used Surface devices and it's worked pretty well. You can see what's working and what's not here.
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
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Huh... Yeah, you know what? I never thought of looking at second hand Surface tablets...
I'm using a second hand Surface 6 Pro (bought for €300 or so incl. keyboard cover), now running Arch (with linux-surface kernel) with KDE.
Everything works great! :) Doubles as a handy little vacation laptop too, and makes me want a touchscreen on my next laptop!
Please feel free to ask ahead if you have any questions about experiences or whatnot.
How is your drawing experience?
I have a second hand surface still running windows that I draw on. With a paper like screen protector I find it quite pleasant. Mines a 6 I think, runs Krita great I imagine it'd be even better if I ditched windows bloat.
I happen to have LMDE installed on a Lenovo Thinkpad Carbon X1 (Gen 3) tablet. It has a stylus that takes a AAAA (yes, quad-A) battery. Its an i5 or i7 Intel processor, and has a 3k Wacom sensor display. I've played with Inkscape on it and I think it fits the bill nicely, but it's also discontinued.
Cinnamon was the only DE with DPI scaling that worked worth a damn, and also had good native support for screen autorotation and onscreen keyboard.
I need to completely wipe and reinstall the system now because I configured my slices too small, and for some reason decided not to put root in an LVM like a sane person would have (it was 2017 tho. Different times....)
Anyhoo, if you can come by one through the refurb market, I think it comes closest to your spec, saving the no-battery stylus.
Your best bet is anything Wacom as they have their own driver in Linux. Alternatively OpenTabletDriver supports some other tablets as well https://opentabletdriver.net/Tablets.
Or the DIGImend kernel driver http://digimend.github.io/drivers/digimend/tablets/
XPpen also has their own tablet drivers and is 5x the value of wacom. Wacom is the apple of drawing tablets and has been riding their own coattails for like 10 years charging ridiculous prices for old models without doing any innovation.
I think Huion also has Linux drivers now too, though their latest H1061P tablet has a hardware issue with bad pressure sensing.
Though OP was looking more for a standalone PC 2 in 1 tablet with a touchscreen that doesn't have to be plugged in at all.
Yeah, agreed. XP Pen is great value for money. I had a second hand Wacom before and it wasn't particularly better in any way.
I think they mean a tablet computer not the tablet peripheral.
drawing tablet
Yeah, I mean something standalone, not something that needs to be plugged into a computer. I already have an XP Pen Artist 13.
The Lenovo Yoga 6 works surprisingly well. I got it to replace a surface book for my daughter and wasn't really sure what parts of the hardware would be supported, but literally everything I tested works (the only thing I haven't tried is the fingerprint reader) and the included stylus is amazing in krita as well as just generally. The tablet mode works well, and tent mode is more convenient when it's on a desk (screen rotation requires the iio-sensor-proxy package). Battery life is decent; it gets around 6-7 hours with moderate use. I'd recommend using it with KDE.
Minisforum V3
Most standalone drawing devices should work with Linux though.
Ooh, that one is quite expensive.
I don't think you're going to find much cheaper for a full fledged tablet format machine with a high res capacitive touchscreen @165hz that will render what you're asking for. This is the exact package you're looking for though. Maybe wait for a sale.
Pretty sure my XP Pen's refresh rate isn't 165hz, and I find it perfectly fine to work on, so I don't need something with such a high refresh rate.
At about 13 inches the resolution of the screen doesn't need to be more than 1080p either.
It's not exactly what you are looking for, because the pen is not battery free, but the star lite is a surface style convertible that ships with Linux out of the box. And it supports MPP pens
https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1004/xppen-artist-pro-16-gen-2-review-on-gnulinux
Edit: ah, I should read the OP 🤦♂️
Good list if I were looking for just any tablet, but I'm specifically looking one with artist capabilities, such as a pressure sensitive surface and a battery free pen. This list doesn't mention much about such capabilities.
Somebody make a linux-pad with the new snapdragon chip, pencil, keyboard dock and display out
I can report that the HP ENVY X360 15-eu0013ca has a Wacom display and pen and it works perfectly under Linux.
PineTab 2 works but no WiFi or Bluetooth driver for now. Possible to add a USB dongle or USB-C to Ethernet to install missing apps though then work. Also not super powerful so even though I bet Blender3D works, doubt it'd be pleasant for heavy scenes.
Hmmm... The PineTab looks incredibly experimental still. It's a option, but I'll wait and see how the development of this one is going.
A suggestion for you: Microsoft and Qualcomm are working on ARM based laptops with impressive numbers right now. I believe in a year after those are released you'll see tablets using the same CPUs that will be way better to run Linux than the garbage we've available today.
The issue with most ARM / Android tablets right now is that besides having locked bootloaders (so much bitching about Apple and then they do the same) they don't have an UEFI and that means the OS needs to be responsible for the low level shenanigans of booting the systems, initializing the hardware etc. making it so you've to create a tweaked kernel for each device. It isn't feasible to support so much hardware thus there's little to no Linux support on those devices.
Whatever is coming from Qualcomm right now will feature an UEFI and will be a more open platform like a generic x86 computer and we'll get Linux support really fast.
It is, if you are not ready to tinker I do not recommend it.
Yet, it works as-is, assuming you don't need to work wirelessly. I use it on a nearly daily basis and it's stable.
Hmm, for drawing when travelling I wouldn't be streaming or hanging out on discord, so being constantly connected to the Internet would not be a priority, just that it's good for drawing without a mess of dongles and cables.
Not being able to upload a WIP or a completed commission to a customer might be annoying, though...
See other comments, apparently WiFi is working now (I'm updating right now so can't confirm) and I forgot but for drawing it's just a touch screen, so it doesn't support "fancy" pens with e.g pressure iirc.
Wifi works now, the wiki is out of date.
However, the Pinetab 2 does not have the screen layer for stylus support. See the FAQ
Right I should clarify I used only the "cheap" kind of pen that does not include pressure, as if used their fingers but with a smaller rigid tip.
Regarding WiFi working, thanks for the update, any pointer on how to do that? Just updating the stock Danctnix?
Edit: neat, it works! No BT though
PineTab 2 works but no WiFi or Bluetooth driver for now
Are you sure those drivers will come at any point? I'm not.
Update : it works now! Just updated Danctnix and voila, WiFi networks detected and connected.
PS: no BT though
I bought an xp-pen pro (15 inchish) for my daughter xmas before last and she uses it almost every day on her steamdeck desktop.
Edit: Derp. I read your comment after posting based on the thread title. So I guess this is a +1 for xp-pen pro if any future reader is looking for an attached drawing tablet for linux.
Yeah, XP Pen offers native Linux drivers, and the guys from Open Tablet Driver have also made their driver work with older XP Pen models, so it's a pretty great wired tablet for Linux users.
But... Uh... Yeah... I'm looking for a standalone, because travelling with my XP Pen 13 and needing to play dongle-fu with Steam Deck is very awkward.
Mi pad 5, but I don't know if it supports wacom on linux.
Took a glance at it, not bad price range. I'll be looking more into it. Thank you. ^^
But don't expect everything to work.
You got a Debian vm in all Chromebooks, so any of them with stylus support should do. However I didn't try if the Debian VM supports the stylus. Try google it. You could stil replace ChromeOS with any Linux distro If necessary