From my experience I've learned that every configuration has one or more "Linux unfriendly" hardware. Not so long ago Wacom tablets were one of those stubborn pieces of an equipment. It's true that Wacom driver existed but it wasn't included in your favorite distribution. You had to go to The Linux Wacom Project web page, and download unofficial Wacom driver in its source version. Then you had to spend a few days compiling, crunching through online documents and trough your distributions configuration files adding lines in hope that somehow it'll work.

In the recent years things began to look better for our tablets. Now almost every Linux distribution has a Wacom driver included. It may not be the newest version, but Wacom driver is very mature and in 90% of cases works just fine. So now with a driver included in your distribution you're just a few mouse clicks (keyboard clicks to be precise) away from working tablet in your Linux distribution. I will take the Ubuntu as an example...