Wacom tablet support in Ubuntu
Ubuntu has great Wacom support. It's all plug and play but with great graphical configuration options. You can configure pens and erasers and buttons for all common Wacom tablets. I was even surprised to find that you can lock a tablet to a single monitor in a dual-monitor set-up.
I know this is an old thread, but I think that the below information is relevant to those with the same question that mydoghasworms had a few years ago.
Wacom support is not really up to scratch in 15.04. Still, you can buy a Wacom tablet knowing that you can get it to work well, though it will take a bit of work. I use a combination of the Wacom Tablet settings in System Settings and xsetwacom to set the buttons on my Intuos4 and Intuos5 to things like hotkeys, modifier keys and toggles (even the ring toggle button works). I have not managed to get the LED displays to work, but I didn't try very hard and others seem to have managed it, and in my opinion, a tablet without those working can still be a killer tablet.
These links will provide very useful information: https://braindump.kargulus.de/?p=432
https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon-control-center/issues/76
This one specifically for the correct numbers of the buttons in xsetwacom, that took me ages to figure out: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1380744&page=32
Personally, I think Ubuntu really has to put a lot more effort into the Wacom tablet setup and configuration tools, but still, get yourself a tablet, it is worth it!
By the way, KDE used to have even more customizability options, including the ability to easily switch between program specific button setups, so you could have a setup for Gimp, and another for Krita for instance. This was great, but those options seem to be gone or not working in Plasma 5.
Good luck!
Sorry but the Ubuntu Wacom Gui tool doesn't offer enough options to fully make use of the device, button (re)mapping e.g is not supported, and and you really want to disable/configure the weird touch behaviour and defaults of the device for working without annoyances, or for using it as a mouse replacement.
I bought a Wacom Bamboo Fun Pen & Touch a few days ago hoping to get full support without googling around for days and getting dirty in the terminal and heavy text editing.. but exactly this is what you have to do, otherwise the device is almost unusable for any serious work. Take that in mind before paying the extra Wacom price compared to other brands. You have to get dirty with text editing anyway, it doesn't matter if you use Arch or Ubuntu, or if you buy a random UC Logic Tablet or Wacom one, to use the device like it should be used a similar amount of self effort is required, and this can put a lot of people off.
If Canonical want artists using other OS switching to Ubuntu, they NEED to make a proper GUI tool for those widespread devices, or artists will return to other operating systems immediately.
If you're comfortable with text editing/scripting, the options to configure the devices are great though.