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[Linux] Wayland support
B
Ben Grant
I run GNOME 3.36 on top of Wayland and Arch Linux. I can create meetings and start the screen share with no reported issues, but people who join only see a black screen (plus whatever I have drawn). This is because Screen is trying to use X11 APIs to capture what's on my screen, but things work differently under Wayland so it is not able to capture anything.
Here is code that implements screen capture under Wayland for OBS Studio: https://gitlab.gnome.org/feaneron/obs-xdg-portal/-/tree/master. Screen will probably need to do something similar (or wait for Chromium/Electron to support screen capture under Wayland).
Output of
snap info screen
:name: screen
summary: Supercharged meetings for remote engineering teams
publisher: Screen, Inc. (screen)
store-url: https://snapcraft.io/screen
contact: team@screen.so
license: unset
description: |
Communicate visually with drawing. Collaborate efficiently with multiplayer
screen sharing. So easy, it feels like you’re in the same room.
commands:
- screen
snap-id: HBe7T7yVKD7Tm1rQ2A2MZSMV00lsuSy9
tracking: latest/stable
refresh-date: today at 13:01 PDT
channels:
stable: 1.0.14 2020-03-24 (73) 143MB -
candidate: ↑
beta: ↑
edge: 0.8.32 2019-11-25 (26) 121MB devmode
installed: 1.0.14 (73) 143MB -
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Simon Law
Trying to run Pop (dev) 8.0.23 with Wayland leads to a segfault:
slaw@nyancat:~$ /usr/bin/pop-dev --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
Firing up GDB is not particularly useful because pop-dev is shipped without symbols. Still, here is the backtrace:
Thread 1 "Pop-dev" received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x0000555557f37324 in ?? ()
(gdb) bt
#0 0x0000555557f37324 in ()
#1 0x00007fffffffc350 in ()
#2 0x0000555557f32f02 in ()
#3 0x00007fffffffc3c0 in ()
#4 0x00007fffffffc388 in ()
#5 0x00007fffffffc3b0 in ()
#6 0x00005555575c193c in ()
#7 0x0000347c8c886260 in ()
#8 0x0000347c8c886260 in ()
#9 0x0000347c8ca01a40 in ()
#10 0xaaaaaaaaaaaaaa01 in ()
#11 0x00007fffffffc3c0 in ()
#12 0x0000347c8ca01980 in ()
#13 0x00007fffffffc4d8 in ()
#14 0x00007fffffffc3c0 in ()
#15 0x0000191408d1c08d in ()
#16 0x0000000000000000 in ()
J Sherwani (Pop Team)
open
While capturing the screen is now supported in Electron (which is now supported in Slack), Wayland makes it difficult to capture key/mouse events which are required for shared control.
I've created a new feature request around screen sharing
+ draw on Wayland, with some caveats.
Please read the following description and upvote if you'd find the limited feature scope significantly useful: https://screen.canny.io/feature-requests/p/wayland-screen-share-draw-but-no-control
E
Elijah Lynn
J Sherwani (Pop Team): Here is the support.pop.com link, so others don't have to login twice (under screen.canny.io) > https://support.pop.com/feature-requests/p/wayland-screen-share-draw-but-no-control.
M
Mark Dixon
Slack works for me on sway with a simple
slack --enable-features=WebRTCPipeWireCapturer
, surely it should be similar for all electron apps? I tried it on pop, but it seems it detects wayland and then refuses to continue.J
Joel Nordström
If screensharing on Wayland is complicated, maybe you could start with implementing viewing someone else's screen? Currently, the app just doesn't do anything when I launch it in Sway except asking me to switch to X.
J Sherwani (Pop Team)
Merged in a post:
"Exotic" wayland support
J
Jiří Prokop
Hello, I recently discovered your app and it seems very nice. I've read your blog post and realize you are a very small team but I'd like to ask this anyway.
Would you consider to support some of the "exotic" wayland desktop environments (Linux OS)?
I know you already partially support it but I'm not using Gnome, I use Sway which is based on wlroots. They recently added support for Pipewire protocol which makes screensharing working nicely.
Also there would be ways how to enable inputting.
I can provide some guidelines if you would be interested into supporting this niche setup, although I will fully understand why you won't.
And thanks for a great work, btw.
J Sherwani (Pop Team)
Merged in a post:
[Linux] Wayland - Clicks on any top bar items ignored when in a meeting
Ali Asad Lotia
Distribution: Arch Linux
Desktop Environment: Gnome 3.36
Compositor: Mutter (default wayland compositor for Gnome)
While in a Wayland session, when I start a meeting I am clicking on the Gnome top bar items such as the clock (which also brings up the notifications history and calendar among other things) has no effect. Ending the meeting restores the expected functionality of displaying the expanded view of the top bar item when it is clicked.
screen.so snap details
Steps to reproduce:
- Ensure you are running Gnome under Wayland. That can be confirmed by looking at the "Settings -> About" or running 'echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE' in a terminal running within that session and confirming the output is 'wayland'
- Start screen.so
- Start a meeting
- Click on the top bar and confirm that clicks are not registering
- End the meeting and click on the top bar and note that the clicks are registering
name: screen
summary: Supercharged meetings for remote engineering teams
publisher: Screen, Inc. (screen)
store-url: https://snapcraft.io/screen
contact: team@screen.so
license: unset
description: |
Communicate visually with drawing. Collaborate efficiently with multiplayer
screen sharing. So easy, it feels like you’re in the same room.
commands:
- screen
snap-id: HBe7T7yVKD7Tm1rQ2A2MZSMV00lsuSy9
tracking: latest/stable
refresh-date: 2 days ago, at 10:11 BST
channels:
latest/stable: 1.0.16 2020-03-30 (75) 143MB -
latest/candidate: ↑
latest/beta: ↑
latest/edge: 0.8.32 2019-11-25 (26) 121MB devmode
installed: 1.0.16 (75) 143MB -
J
Jiří Prokop
Here's the link, the tool is called Espanso, the Wayland code is in this branch: https://github.com/federico-terzi/espanso/tree/dev-1.x
The related issue: https://github.com/federico-terzi/espanso/issues/287#issuecomment-779327423
J Sherwani (Pop Team)
Hi Jiří — thanks for writing in, and I'm sorry for the delayed response. We're now working on adding Wayland support, and would love your support in this. Please find a time via https://calendly.com/j-pop/30min if that works for you — if you need time slots that aren't in this list, feel free to suggest any that are slightly outside, as I can stay up late to speak with you. Thank you!
J Sherwani (Pop Team)
We are now looking into Wayland support in a big way. However, we need some help as we aren't experts in Wayland (or even X for that matter). If any one of you knows someone that we could pay to speak with as a consultant on this, please let us know. We're working on things on our end but I figure it doesn't hurt to ask our community!
B
Bennett Piater
J Sherwani (Pop Team): You may want Drew DeVault - he wrote a wayland compositor (Sway) and module library for implementing wayland compositors (wlroots) as well as the literal wayland book (https://wayland-book.com/)
He is also available for consulting in principle - not sure about his schedule of course :)
However, he may refuse to work on non-free software :P
T
Thomas Ritter
J Sherwani (Pop Team): Two developers working with Wayland in this field are:
They both work for RedHat, so I'm not sure if they are able to consult here, but maybe you can reach out to them.
J Sherwani (Pop Team)
We're working on a fix for this, and have a potential solution. If anyone here is able to, please download our dev build from https://dev.pop.com/download (it runs on a totally separate database with its own authentication, so you'll have to sign up for a new account there). Let us know if the dev app works on Wayland for you, and let us know if you run into any issues. Thanks!
T
Thomas Ritter
J Sherwani (Pop Team): Hi, thanks for the info, I tried it and ran into the following problem. When I try to share the screen, I get the usual permission window for screen sharing under Wayland. For some reason, it seems to be blocked though, I cannot click on anywhere on the window, it seems like an invisible window is in front of it, preventing me to click on the window. I also tried keyboard navigation with tabs but was only able to reach the "Cancel" button and hit enter. This was the only way I could get out of it by the way, I could not click on cancel. I tried this with an external monitor and without it, I restarted Pop a few times and I also did a reboot, so it seems it's not a temporary issue on my machine.
I'm using Fedora 33 under Gnome, with all the latest updates. Let me know if you need more information on this.

J Sherwani (Pop Team)
Thomas Ritter: Thanks, I've been able to reproduce that. So it looks like we have some more work to do. I'll let you know once things are looking good.
R
Raman Gupta
J Sherwani (Pop Team): Trying out pop dev right now, and looks like Wayland is disabled again? I get the same message that pop doesn't support Wayland.
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