Fun fact, I found in a box of my wife, a 10 years old super cheap drawing tablet, I cannot find the driver any where on internet, so i just pluged on my linux desktop, and it works ! And even better than my wife remember it did.
So there is no driver issue, when you have the community as a black up, thanks to the people making all those things working !

I use messages from https://github.com/FossifyOrg works well, there is no plenty of settings, so not very customisable.
i used mood before, but i changed because they added advertising in the app https://moodsms.com/