I have to use Slack for work and screen sharing doesn't work when I'm using Wayland.
this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
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Don't let Slack launch at startup. As long as it launches after pipewire - everything works. Your can also restart it to fix sharing issue, but that can be a birch if you already started a call.
Is there a way to control the launch order? I suppose you could also find a script that waits for a given process to be responsive before launching another, but I'm not sure where I'd insert that either.
(I've been using Ubuntu mostly out-of-the-box so far and just now started having the time and energy to start learning about and fiddling with the internals)
If it launches via a systemd service, you can perhaps edit the file such that it depends on Pipewire before it launches.
Or disable the built in startup support and create your own service that does the same.
I'm not sure that would work. Pipewire probably starts via system (just takes a while to become functional) and slack is started by KDE. I guess you could just add a delay to slack's start, but I just start it by hand.
Starting by hand is fine and I do it with just about anything I need anyway (though I suspect there is still some startup bloat I'll need to sort out, if I don't set up an entirely new system somewhere down the line), but don't underestimate my compulsion to automate what I can (or at least know how to).
I'm a sucker for automation for automation's sake :D
That has nothing to do with Slack's screen sharing issues. Screen sharing was broken due to Electron bugs and it's fixed in Slack 4.34.
I'd argue lazy choice of wrapping your website inside chrome instead of building a native app is Slack's issue.
I also wonder whether Slack fixed it or just waited for Google to fix it since Slack seems to only have UI designers and no actual devs on their team. They keep pumping out useless UI changes while actual bugs take years to fix.
Many Electron maintainers are Slack employees. They're contributing upstream more than most other companies that use Electron, especially compared to their size.
Could you name a couple? Genuinely interested to check out their contributions.
Also, I just updated to 4.34.119 and screen sharing is still completely broken. As is typical with Slack.
Oh, thx for the tip!
As long as it launches after pipewire
Why? Why plasma nailed own screensharing to audio server? There already are wayland extensions for this.
Pioewire handles audio and video pipelines between applications.
So why Wayland instead of pipewire at all?
Because Pipewire only handles and understands media streams, so it can stream the output of a window or the whole desktop, but only because the Wayland compositor has already composed the windows and other data it gets from the application to a visual and hands the final result to Pipewire.
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I started running OBS with a virtual camera to do screen sharing. It is so much nicer to manage sharing with OBS than with Slack/Google Meet/Discord.
Oh, never heard of this, I will check it out thx.
Oh, that sounds like an interesting idea. Currently stuck with teams at work. Screen sharing does work under wayland. But definitely going to try this.
Try using XWayland video bridge. It should allow any XWayland apps to use screen sharing. Unfortunately most distros either don't ship it yet or ship broken versions but you can download nightly Flatpaks from Gitlab CI
I'm not sure why, but every time I use XWayland Video Bridge (installed as of about 2 days ago so it should still be pretty new), I just end up with a black screen being broadcasted - not sure what could be causing that.
Thx!
I want to switch to Wayland. I try it every month to see if it is working with my system and so far it is not.
Ubuntu 23.04/Nvidia 3080/Steam. It use to work with the old big picture mode but when steam went to the new one, Wayland broke for me.
That's weird. I thought Steam doesn't support Wayland at all and runs using XWayland.
Gamescope makes the experience a lot better with steam at least for me in swaywm. I experimented with running each game in gamescope using launch options but with gamescope's mediocre support of the steam overlay some multiplayer invite stuff doesn't work correctly. Running steam in bigpicture within gamescope pretty much solves all these issues and seems to improve performance too.
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Good read, provided context that I didn't have before as a newbie
So most complaints you read about Wayland missing this or that (such as fractional scaling, or screen sharing, or global shortcuts) from over a year or two ago are likely to be wrong today.
Is fractional scaling in Wayland really working now? I tried it a while ago and everything was blurry mess.
I just tried this and it was blurry until I logged out and back in!
Just tried it on my laptop and xwayland apps are still blurry mess, even after restart. However, all apps I use now has Wayland support that can be enabled with some flags or environmental variables, so they are actually usable now with fractional scaling. Finally I can use my laptop with 175% scaling, which is much more comfortable than 200% scaling.
In display settings check the box to allow x11 apps to scale themselves instead of the compositor. Your cursor will still be blurry but the app content itself will be fine. A few apps like steam won't scale without some kind of launch flag though.
I don't see this option. I didn't even see the option to set fractional scaling without enabling experimental flag from command line.
I assumed you were on KDE since the dev who wrote the blog post was talking about KDE Wayland but are you on gnome? Gnome"s fractional scaling implementation isn't as good as KDE's.
It's working with Sway from a quick test:
swaymsg output DP-1 scale 1.7
But XWayland is blurry as expected (that's the big blocker, or all useful apps being ported to Wayland).
We need another display system. Something more dev friendly and more desktop agnostic.
I seems Wlroots is designed to be server agnostic (despite the name), if it is bound to a new display server many apps should be available.
I'd run Wayland on my main PC but Nvidia drivers don't support Wayland too well, when they do I'll switch over but for now I'll wait
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