A new Wayland-only feature merged for GNOME 49's Mutter is support for tablet pad relative dials. These dials found on some drawing tablets now allow for relative moment under the GNOME Wayland session when paired with recent libinput and libwacom releases.

Red Hat input expert Peter Hutterer has been working on this tablet pad relative dial support the past year. After the Wayland protocol support along with libinput and libwacom changes, the GNOME Mutter support has been merged but only along its Wayland code paths without X11 support. There are also changes made to GNOME Shell for the dial support that have yet to be merged.

The Huion Inspiroy Dial Q620M is one such drawing tablet with a dial now supported.

The Wayland protocol addition to the tablet-v2 protocol explains of the relative dials intent:

"Some tablets provide one or more rotary controls (see e.g. the Huion Inspiroy Dial 2) that provide delta information effectively equivalent to a mouse wheel. Expose those in the same way as the strip or ring controls, with the event matching the wl_pointer.axis_v120 approach."

Those with such tablet pads having dials on them can learn more about this new GNOME Wayland support via [1]this Mutter merge that landed today for what will then be found in GNOME 49 this September.



[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/3724