Hi, y'all

This past week or so I ran an update that has effectively rendered my drawing tablet useless on my PC. It worked fine for literal years up until then.

I use Gnome as my only DE. I have used Wayland as my windowing manager for ~18 months. Of note, the update after which I noticed strange behavior was somewhere around when I updated to Gnome 50.

I installed this particular build through arch-install script, and *did* have KDE Plasma alongside it, but I have long-since uninstalled all non-essential KDE packages without event.

The issue first entered my attention with Krita. The tablet (which I typically use in relative positioning, with "tablet mode" turned off in Gnome's settings) and the mouse essentially had a separate cursor. I could draw with the tablet and the mouse's cursor would disappear. I could move the mouse and the tablet's cursor would disappear. When I went into krita's "canvas-only mode," in which the progam enters full-screen with no dockers visible, the two cursors seemed to alternate between each other as the "real" one and essentially render that mode unusable. I rely heavily on canvas only mode as part of my workflow, and simply wanted to find a solution so I could use my art software of choice on my desktop environment of choice as normal.

I began by looking in the Krita forums as the issue appeared to be exclusive to the program. I noted that the flatpak build I prefer to use was not supported directly by the developers. I used the Krita-recommended appimage package for krita, to the same result. Additionally, I tried the arch repo system package of krita - running on qt6 with native wayland support - to the same result.

Upon doing further research, I found the "two cursor" issue was reported by many folks throughout the years across multiple OS' and distro's, and a common cause was having multiple drivers for the device on the same system.

I meticulously tested different combinations of removing and re-installing base packages from the  graphics tablet page, various qt5 & qt6 packages, xorg, x11, xwayland, and wayland packages and their dependencies thinking it might be some issue where I was unintentionally running the x11 driver and the wayland driver at the same time. I did all of this via

pacman -Rns [package] && reboot

for each iteration that made sense given my theories and the suggestions I was turning up from finding similar or adjacent issues folks had spoke of throughout the years.

At some point - although I do not know exactly when - the issue escalated to the current state, where the tablet cursor is not able to interact with krita at all. Could not draw on the canvas with the tablet (although the mouse worked fine), could not interact with any UI elements with the tablet, and could not even grab the application window with the tablet pen. This behavior is also present for OBS, GIMP, and inkscape, all of which are running on x11 on my system.

Additionally - though this may have been present the entire time - I have noticed that there is a persistent second cursor stuck in the upper right corner of my screen, although it does not show up in screenshots.

I have noticed that the tablet pen will interact with Krita, only when my mouse cursor is also moving.

xorg-xeyes does register both the mouse, and the tablet's cursors moving over krita, the gnome tablet & stylus settings has a test window that registers input just fine, including pressure sensitivity. lsusb shows the device appropriately as ID 056a:033e Wacom Co., Ltd CTH-690 [Intuos Art (M)].

I have also

• cleared my pacman cache.

• ran multiple, full system updates making sure to include any AUR package updates

• Followed numerous cleanup tips on the "pacman tips and tricks" page in the archwiki

• ensured that there are no orphaned packages on my system

• Ran a script to list every package on my system's optional dependencies that I did not have installed, along with their descriptions, and installed any of the ones that seemed helpful

• fully reinstalled every single package on my system

To no success.

Gnome logs reads out

wacom 0003:056A:033E.000C: hidraw1: USB HID v1.10 Device [Wacom Co.,Ltd. Intuos PTM] on usb-0000:0f:00.4-1/input1
wacom 0003:056A:033E.000B: hidraw0: USB HID v1.10 Device [Wacom Co.,Ltd. Intuos PTM] on usb-0000:0f:00.4-1/input0

Upon reconnecting the tablet.

I apologize in advance for not having better documentation for the steps I have taken in my attempt to resolve this issue. I have easily put about 20 hours into troubleshooting over the past week, and my search history has been cluttered with dozens of different phrasings yielding scores of different forums from across many many years.

I did not find anybody having this same issue here, in the Krita forums, or in the gnome forums, when filtered for activity from the last month. I am left to assume that it is a problem specific to my system.

I will happily provide specific info as it is deemed helpful. I'm simply stumped on how to proceed.  I am not even certain it is an issue with the tablet's drivers. I do not know what else I can try at this point.

Last edited by GoldApricot (Today 08:31:09)