Microsoft Surface Pen Compatibility / Interoperability FAQ (2024) | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Surface Pen Compatibility / Interoperability FAQ (2024)

dancharblog.wordpress.com

47 pointsLammy31 comments

The reasons we're here are:

  - By far the most popular use case of digital pens is drawing arts on a computer. Often anime, sometimes 3D.
  - Wacom is the king for artists. They also still hold some patents btw.
  - Wacom is DEFINITELY NOT THE KING for note taking and other non-art purposes. Laggy, parallax is huge, API is proprietary, etc.
  - Due to above, both Microsoft and Apple tried to replace Wacom by various means with not anime art use cases in mind but not ruling it out completely, from buying Israeli startups to reinventing stylus. 
  - The situations up until here threatened Wacom enough that it started upgrading and fragmenting pen implementations.
  - The situations down to this line caused bunch of players to join into the game, further fragmenting implementations.
  - And that had caused bunch of incompatible pen implementations, with limited successes with various standardization attempts. And here we are.
  - And by the way, Wacom is still the king for most pen buyers.

This is amazing. I recently got a Go 2 (no stylus but want one). I am a little apprehensive of Win 11, so until I am sure, I am duel booting with Fedora (which is working fine for most part).

> Are there any recommendations for stylus being used on MS hardware but running linux?

All references (understandably) assume windoes but there is literally no report that I could find for machines running linux. I am even unsure weather the requirements are purely hardware bound or also require proper software. Any help will be appreciated.

You'll need these two lists for Linux:

+ wacom - https://github.com/linuxwacom/input-wacom/wiki/Device-IDs

+ digimend - https://digimend.github.io/tablets/

Both are in-kernel for most distributions.

For Surface devices:

https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/wiki/Supporte...

> duel booting with Fedora

Please report back on who wins the duel. I assume lances, not pistols?

I didn't think it was possible to design a more confusing compatibility matrix than the Apple Pencil but there you go.

Not sure? It seems to me that the pen that launched with the Surface Pro 3 (V2), still works to an extent with the Surface Pro 11? That seems rather good, no?

Apple Pencil compatibility chart, for comparison https://f.nooncdn.com/cms/pages/20250530/31608d4ea3ae92b5bbe...

Simpler than the one from the HN-linked blog.

It would make even more sense if sorted by iPad release date.

It's not like someone's going to buy a brand new M-series iPad and then get a 10-year-old first gen pencil for it.

I believe what's what a commenter upstream is trying to complain about, but I couldn't make full sense of what he wrote.

So long as you ignore the Surface RT/Pro 1/Pro 2 (that is, devices from 2013 or previous), all Surface pens since 2014 work with all devices through today. The matrix doesn't seem particularly complicated.

Except for the Surface Go _Laptops_ (different from the Surface Go _tablets_), for which there is no stylus support at all. That said, still an order of magnitude simpler than the Apple one.

Not just confusing, but inconvenient! If you buy a 10th or 11th gen iPad plus the Apple Pencil that works with it, you have no way to charge that Pencil at all.

It can't charge from the iPad. It can't charge from USB-C. It can't charge from a Lightning charger.

You have to go out and buy a special charger that only charges the Apple Pencil and literally nothing else. It's a completely proprietary connection, a pointlessly inverted version of the Lightning connector, that never could and never will charge anything other than your stylus.

Despite Apple having the option of allowing it to charge from a Lightning cable, or Usb-C, or not charge at all and simply get power from the device light Samsung's S-Pen, Apple chose to opt for None Of The Above and allow the Apple Pencil to charge exclusively from the specific Apple Pencil charger.

Why?

Because screw you. Because Apple makes money when you buy that 20$ charging adapter and doesn't care that you have to carry that adapter with you everywhere now.

They could have made it charge from the iPad charger.

They could have made it charge from the iPhone charger.

They could have made it charge by attaching to the iPad.

They could have powered it wirelessly like Samsung and never need charging at all.

But no. They chose the worst of all worlds, the most painful, expensive, and inconvenient possible option, and allowed it to only charge from a specific "First generation Apple Pencil Charger" that isn't included with the iPad or even the Pencil itself.

That's right, you go out today and buy a brand new iPad and a brand new Apple Pencil, and you can't use the Pencil. At all. You have to also but the separate Apple Pencil Charging Adapter. Because Fuck You. We're Apple and Fuck You.

>> Samsung's S-Pen

Is Wacom. Wacom hates magnets. Apple devices are littered with magnets

What does this mean that Wacom hates magnets? I attached a steel plate to the back of my S24 Ultra, in the car it's held on by a big honking magnet. I use the Wacom stylus all the time.

Very curious if there's a fine detail that I'm missing. Thanks.

Put a magnet near the front of screen and try to use spen

I'll try it in the name of science, but I've never encountered this. What is your use case? In the 13 years I've been using Wacom stylii on phones and E-ink devices, I've never encountered this.

Put on a 3rd party wallet style case with magnet that keeps it closed. Parts of the screen near the magnet stop responding to spen for a time.

Just tested on Note 8. Put magnet on the back of phone and area about 10 times the size of the magnet stops working with s-pen

Samsung's Fold devices (1 to 6) are also riddled with magnets (everywhere) and Wacom works fine, and with flexible substrate no less.

That said, apparently it was expensive for them: they got rid of it in this year's iteration.

The 10th and 11th generation iPads work with _both_ the Lightning Apple Pencil and the USB-C Apple Pencil.

The Lightning Apple Pencil was sold at a time when you could plug it directly into the compatible iPad, and it *came with the adapter*.

The current iPad is compatible with both, so you could use your old Apple Pencil with the new iPad.

You cannot buy a Lightning Apple Pencil anymore because Apple doesn’t sell them.

who knows what third-party retailers are doing.

Wait, so if I have an Apple Pencil Gen1 that seems to be dead, it might "just" be that I can't charge it on my iPad?

If it’s been lying in a drawer for a year, 99% chance the battery is dead

Despite Microsoft making a bunch of different versions of pens, they mostly all just work. This post is trying to be exhaustive but the vast majority of people who aren't extremely Deep into the Photoshop game will not need or care about any of this.

Basically, "If the pen fits in the keyboard slot, it just works". I'm currently using a pen from a Surface Pro 7 on my new Surface Pro 12" and it was trivial to connect it and it works great

Some non-Surfaces too. I’m using a Microsoft Surface Pen “Model 1776” a.k.a. “Ver.4” a.k.a “Surface Pen with no clip” with my Framework Laptop 12 folded all the way around into tablet mode.

Doesn't even need to fit in the slot either. One of my Surface Pens is an older one that uses a AAAA battery and doesn't fit in the keyboard slot. It works just fine on my SP11 and older SPX. It just has less features and isn't as good as the newer Slim Pen 2.

Really wish that they had stuck w/ Wacom --- the pen technology not being the same as my phone (Samsung Galaxy Note 10+), e-book reader (Kindle Scribe), and desktop display (Wacom One, probably going to update to a Movink 13 or 14) is why I bought a Samsung Galaxy Book 12, then when it got long in the tooth, a Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360.

That said, it's hard to take Microsoft seriously on styluses when they crippled them to an 11th touch input in Fall Creators Update:

https://github.com/TheJoeFin/Windows10-Community/issues/17

I'm getting sick of leaving the Settings app open so that I can toggle how the sytlus behaves, depending on which app I'm using, so I'm looking into making a cyberdeck w/ an rPi 5 and a Wacom One 13 Gen 2 display.

Beyond the obvious business reasons to want to keep money in a walled garden with constantly dying plants that require buying fresh seeds, are there technical reasons why there are so many incompatible pen types?

There are three active stylus technologies. All of them require proprietary software support - two of which have strict non-forwards nor backwards compatibility.

I recently learned that there are digital pens now that almost perfectly resemble classical traditional writing tools, like the black and yellow Staedtler pencil.

I was so disappointed to learn that they won't work with current Wacom Cintiq line, and it took me while to figure that out.

Pen compatibility is a mess.

I have been using that Staedtler pencil for almost three years. I absolutely love it. I think I'm on only my third or forth nib. I've used it with Note and S Ultra devices, and a Boox E-ink device.

You will want the Wacom Movink 13 and 14 and MovinkPad 11 for that.

For Wacom at least, it's not that bad, there are product lines (which are further sub-divided into generations):

- Pro: Intuos/Cintiq

- consumer

- specialized mobile/folding

and the styluses are specific to each, except for products which straddle a divide such as the Movink, or the strange case of a folding phone where the stylus uses the same frequency as the eraser of the consumer line (I suspect to prevent folks from damaging the hinge with a hard tip).

That said, it's pretty easy to gut a Wacom stylus and place the innards in any shell one wants.

That said, I miss some of the older products --- esp. the tracing pucks and the "airbrush" handles and the stylus ID which allowed one to assign different tools in Painter to different physical styluses and switch by putting one down and grabbing another.

That said, it's just magical that I can: take a note on my Kindle Scribe, switch to drawing on my Wacom One or Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360, and _not_ have to switch tools, since they all use the same stylus technology --- best of all, I'll never have to spend a weekend at my mother-in-law's w/o a stylus, since the stylus in my Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ serves as a backup (and for expressive drawing on the go I can get the Lamy Wacom Stylus out of my bag).

Another pro for Wacom - in-kernel Linux driver support. My brother donated me a Wacom tablet from 2002 that "just works" and has full digitizer settings and keybinds in my GNOME settings app. Apparently the modern Windows/MacOS Wacom driver experience isn't quite so forgiving...

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