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

https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1154/why-drawing-tablet-brands-wont-collaborate-on-linux-floss-drivers

89•Tomte•2h ago

Comments

ndiddy•1h 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.

otikik•1h ago

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

burnte•1h 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.

KaiserPro•1h ago

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

Onavo•1h ago

main vs master

inigyou•42m ago

personally my default branch is called dominatrix, just to annoy the kind of person who argues about master

egypturnash•26m ago

Do you call all your subsidiary branches “paypigs”?

wiether•41m ago

The issue has always been with the reasons invoked to make the change

Otherwise it would have been smoother

otikik•39m ago

mainster

QuercusMax•19m ago

ugh, half the repos at work use main and half use master. Such a pain.

inigyou•41m ago

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

myrmidon•39m 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).

MomsAVoxell•33m 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...

fouc•49m 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.

__mharrison__•33m ago

Name it something really confusing like... Linuxtablet

inigyou•23m 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.

toomim•16m 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.

abdullahkhalids•37m ago

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

giancarlostoro•2m ago

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

AlienRobot•35m 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•8m 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.

egypturnash•27m 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.

giancarlostoro•3m 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.

kouteiheika•1m 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?

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