GAOMON PD156 Pro Pen Display

Replacement tablet

After a tragic rolly chair accident that saw my last drawing table damaged, I replaced it with my new Gaomon tablet. Great responsiveness and awesome functionality.

Great tablet, works well on linux

The following review will describe how I got the tablet to work best on linux. If you don't care to read all that, just know that I think this tablet is good. My first drawing tablet was a Ugee U1200. The first party driver for that did not work at all on my system, which is Arch-based with KDE and Wayland. So, I used Open Tablet Driver and that was fine. When it came time to upgrade, I wanted a tablet with buttons and an wheel for convenience. Open Tablet Driver doesn't currently support wheels on any tablets, and after my bad experience with the Ugee driver, I wanted to try a different brand. XP Pen is owned by Ugee so I didn't have much faith in them, but Gaomon is under Huion so I thought my chances would be better here. The Gaomon driver technically works on my system, but I think something about the compositor results in the tablet mapping incorrectly to the screen. Open tablet driver maps it properly, but the wheel doesn't work. Fortunately, I learned about the Digimend kernel driver, which makes the tablet recognizable by KDE tablet settings. From there, I was able to use Input Remapper to bind all of the tablet buttons as well as the wheel. The only functionality I'm losing out on with this setup is the button at the center of the wheel, although I'm sure I could just program any of the other buttons on the tablet to replace it. I imagine this whole driver issue is just because of my specific system setup, but I just wanted to let the people know what alternative driver options are out there.