Comment 11 for bug 1297692

I've tried i3 here and Onboard doesn't seem to bother. When Window->force-to-top is off it even gets tiled, but I can still type with all devices. The fact that you can type with a mouse would speak against i3 being an issue too.

Thanks for the logs, they helped quite a bit. So the XIDepedentTouch device isn't the screen, it's the Synaptics touch pad. The actual touch screen reports as XIDirectTouch. Both event sources, XInput and Gtk, should then decide this is a GDK_SOURCE_TOUCHSCREEN. However, as I suspected in #5, there are no touch events coming from the wacom driver.

I learned that in order to get touch events, wacom's gesture support has to be disabled. In your case that's
xsetwacom --set "Wacom ISDv4 E6 Finger touch" Gesture off
or
xsetwacom --set 11 Gesture off

But, unfortunately this seems to stop core pointer events too. I do get raw touch events, but the cursor doesn't move. Perhaps you have better luck on the real touch screen, but the gesture support actually seems useful, better keep it.

That leaves fixing Onboard. It's clear now that the "Touch input" setting has to be "none" since "single" and "multi" _require_ touch events on a touch screen. We might need to blacklist wacom devices to automate this, but for now leave it at "none".

Since "none" still leaves Onboard unresponsive for you, and the incoming events are fine, I suspect something is wrong with the event processing code. I can't pinpoint it yet though, so I'll pepper Onboard with more debug output.