My first through was the common Debian situation where there's a mismatch between libwacom2 (which lags releases regularly) and GNOME (which advances fast). It may well not be libwacom at fault, but without a debugging trace we can't tell yet. A recent update to libwacom 0.22 doesn't fix this issue, however. See also Bug#838047 < https://bugs.debian.org/838047 >.
This breaks gnome-shell with all the Wacom and non-Wacom graphics tablets I've tried, crashing gnome-shell at or shortly after the point when they are connected. However the non-tablet USB devices I've tried seem OK, including my (non-Wacom, non-pen, regular multitouch) touchscreen. See bug 838047 for details and log traces. I cannot get the suggested rmmod workaround to work on my system. The non-Wacom tablets still cause gnome-shell to crash immediately upon being plugged in, and when a Wacom tablet is plugged in, the "wacom" kernel module is automatically loaded and stays loaded. I am using Wayland gdm3, and Xorg user gnome-shell sessions. gnome-shell 3.21.91-2 gdm3 3.21.90-1 libwacom2 0.22-1 -- Andrew Chadwick
