Why Drawing Tablet Brands Won't Collaborate on Linux Floss Drivers

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TTomte about 4 hours ago 41 commentsRead Article on davidrevoy.com

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ndiddy•about 2 hours ago

> Well, because it's true: many of the repositories are named after "Wacom". It's a historical legacy on GNU/Linux. It's also a decade-long debate that these repos should be renamed differently.

If the project being named after Wacom is actively causing other companies to not contribute because they believe it’s a Wacom lead project and they’d be helping a competitor, I don’t understand why this is even a debate vs. just changing the name to something vendor neutral.

burnte•about 2 hours ago

And it's been a decade long argument? Sounds like someone is just emotionally attached to something not changing. Those are the hardest problems to solve.

myrmidon•about 1 hour ago

Not necessarily.

The technical people managing the repos might just be opposed to name changing in general (seeing how a boatload of links, references, documentation would require updating, some of which you don't even control), and meanwhile those people might feel the "misbranding" drawbacks much less (if at all).

burnte•27 minutes ago

I would categorize all those as emotional reasons not to change, not logical reasons.

"It's hard!" So? "It's complicated" So? "Some of it other people control." This will always be the case, you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good enough.

If the status quo means a worse project, then you're not changing because you don't WANT to, not because it's a good idea. And that's an emotional, not logical ,decision.

bandofthehawk•17 minutes ago

It seems like it would be simple to just create a fork and archive the old repo. Add a note to the old repo, update a couple of the most important docs and links, and then worry about the rest later. It can be low hanging fruit for new contributors.

shermantanktop•33 minutes ago

That’s exactly it. So many engineers aspire to build generalized, flexible components that get tons of adoption by being easy to use. The problem is that they have have just volunteered to be disconnected from their users. And this myopic refusal to rename Libwacom is a perfect example.

It’s probably down to one underappreciated Linux dev somewhere who is tired of the debate and spends their time fixing actual bugs.

jrm4•35 minutes ago

Preach. And it's a disease.

Signed, the guy who will forever believe GIMP could have been a contender with a name change decades ago.

pmontra•22 minutes ago

In non-English speaking countries gimp is a short word that is so seldom used that nobody knows what it means. I used GIMP for a very long time before running into a story about the meaning of the English world. It was only GNU Image Manipulation Program to me.

It still is a contender for image editing programs, for limited photo retouch, for very limited drawing (draw a rectangle outline without googling?) I use LibreOffice Draw for that.

KaiserPro•about 2 hours ago

Name changes are controversial. Nothing gets nerds going more than changing a project name so companies work better with OSS.

burnte•26 minutes ago

Yes, I know, but that all just underscores what I said about it being emotional. Logically it's not only Wacom but for any tablet. It would do better with a new name as other competitors would help. But the emotional resistance to changing the name keeps those logical improvements form happening.

__mharrison__•about 1 hour ago

Second hardest thing in CS besides cache invalidation and off by one errors....

MomsAVoxell•about 1 hour ago

True nerds name things properly in the first place. The liberal use of -wacom throughout project names and repositories is a consequence of the Wacom itch being scratched - and then that scratch becoming the base upon which Wacoms' competitors can participate. A true nerd would've skipped including the brand in a directory name, in the first place .. I bet these drivers started off being written by graphics designers, not nerds.

inigyou•about 1 hour ago

Yet name changes happen easily when legally forced. Wireshark, MariaDB, and LibreOffice.

Onavo•about 2 hours ago

main vs master

MomsAVoxell•about 1 hour ago

Its most likely a debate because making such a major refactoring effort is actually a heavy work load, there are lots of bits and pieces to tie together and cut out and so on, and the folks capable of shepherding this change through all the parties out into the distro's are already underpaid/under-appreciated too much as it is ..

Hopefully, this situation will get some traction with a bit of noise about it, and the distros can actually put some effort into handling the rename - or maybe a hero will arise in the midst of all the fuss, who just does the full renaming properly, tested, and so on - in a fashion that it simply can't be ignored.

It's definitely an interesting thing to see this happening, anyway. Open Source has many, many troublesome facets when it comes to fairness and equity, but it also has a lot of bright, shining moments. The fact that the technical ability to build these drivers is already a given, and really the thing holding everything back is just the corporate brand obsession, is kind of hilarious though, also.

Duh, you own your competitor by pushing your tech into their brand-space, dummies. This is an opportunity for brands-not-Wacom to eat Wacoms lunch in a delightfully technologically significant way - but, alas, the brand cult reared its maw, instead...

otikik•about 2 hours ago

Yes. It feels like the article was leading towards a reason for not doing that, but then suddenly it just ends.

kouteiheika•about 1 hour ago

> Well, because it's true: many of the repositories are named after "Wacom". It's a historical legacy on GNU/Linux. It's also a decade-long debate that these repos should be renamed differently.

Okay... let's rename them then? I know it's silly, but, well, we've went through the whole pointless `master` -> `main` branch rename in so many projects which was much more disruptive -- at least this one could serve a purpose?

cortesoft•37 minutes ago

I find it interesting that you think this rename serves a purpose when the master to main rename does not.

Neither change has any technical reason. The only reason why either name change was desired is because some contributors were upset by the names.

egypturnash•about 1 hour ago

It’s not like they collaborate on closed-source drivers either. If you have two different brands of tablets in your life then you get to deal with weird bugs from their drivers fighting. And if you’re on Windows they may fight with MS’ attempt at default drivers, too.

fouc•about 2 hours ago

fork and rename the https://github.com/linuxwacom/wacom-hid-descriptors project, strip all wacom references. then share w/ the other tablet brands. problem solved.

toomim•about 1 hour ago

Good point. You don't even need to rename the upstream project. Just create a new project, and get the code there. Since it's open source, it will eventually make its way into the upstream libwacom as well.

__mharrison__•about 1 hour ago

Name it something really confusing like... Linuxtablet

dd8601fn•5 minutes ago

Or, as is tradition, something stupid like “the gimp” or “go”.

inigyou•about 1 hour ago

or Drawing Tablet Drivers for Linux

but open source will never have such sensible names. It'll probably be called something like Ujagu Flemble or Bananahead.

giancarlostoro•about 1 hour ago

Feel free to reply to that email and let them know that your readers just discovered that instead of considering Wacom alternatives, they now believe that Wacom is the only brand they can use on Linux. It seems like the only valid response to that is to give money to the people who make their hardware usable on my software.

TekMol•31 minutes ago

Could AI do it?

Would it work to give the Windows driver to an LLM and tell it to analyze it and write a Linux driver?

abdullahkhalids•about 1 hour ago

Besides Wacom, which tablets would you recommend as good quality?

giancarlostoro•about 1 hour ago

This entire debacle just screams only use Wacom since they're the only ones making their hardware usable on Linux.

AlienRobot•about 1 hour ago

One thing I miss from Windows is the tablet driver GUI. "cinnamon-settings wacom" doesn't let me map buttons to keys (important for software like FireAlpaca, which pans with the space key instead of supporting the middle mouse button like everybody else in the planet), and it also doesn't let me remap the tablet area to arbitrary screen coordinates. These are things I could do on Windows that I can't do through the GUI.

I wrote a Python script to do it using xsetwacom, but I don't know if it would work for anybody else. I don't know if xsetwacom is only for wacom tablets, or if xsetwacom is only for X11 (I'm not on Wayland yet).

nosioptar•about 1 hour ago

xsetwacom does not work with Wayland. I doubt it ever will. Someone could probably build a similar tool that does work with Wayland.

It's just another reason why Wayland isn't ready for daily use.