The GNOME Graphics Tablet Daemon
In Ubuntu, the GNOME Settings Daemon (GSD) is composed of many smaller plugins, each handling a specific piece of hardware or user setting. The gsd-wacom plugin is a dedicated background service designed exclusively to manage Wacom graphics tablets and similar stylus-based input devices. It handles things like mapping the tablet area to your monitor, interpreting pressure sensitivity data for apps like GIMP or Krita, and managing the configuration of the physical buttons on the tablet itself.
While this daemon is absolutely essential for digital artists or photographers who rely on a Wacom tablet for their daily workflow, it is completely useless for the vast majority of standard desktop users who only use a mouse and keyboard. If you do not own a drawing tablet, having a dedicated service constantly running in the background waiting for a Wacom device to be plugged in is a waste of system resources. You can safely disable this plugin to trim down your GNOME environment.
How to Disable the Gsd-wacom Service
Because gsd-wacom is loaded as a plugin by the overarching GNOME Settings Daemon upon login, you cannot easily stop it with a standard systemd service command. The cleanest method is to prevent the binary from executing.
- Open your Ubuntu Terminal.
- To disable the plugin by removing its execute permissions, run the following command:
sudo chmod -x /usr/libexec/gsd-wacom(Note: If you are running an older release of Ubuntu, you may need to look in /usr/lib/gnome-settings-daemon/gsd-wacom).
- To apply the change, either restart your computer or log out of your current GNOME session and log back in.
GNOME will no longer load the Wacom management daemon, freeing up a small amount of memory and speeding up the login process slightly.