Unable to share screen on Linux Fedora at 200% scale factor of a HiDPI screen

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
September 16, 2021
3 replies
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I am running Fedora 34+Gnome+Wayland on a Laptop with a 4K Screen where I have scale factor set to 200%. I'm using the latest available zoom 5.7.6 (which I downloaded and installed right now).

I've noticed that I cannot screen-share (I basically can't select the screen to share) unless:

* I connect the laptop to an external monitor. In this case is a 2K monitor, but I don't know if that is relevant.
* I change the scale factor from 200% to 100% (very inconvenient on a 15" screen).

Is there anyway I can fix this annoying behavior?

In case of any relevance, I have a NVidia GPU but I'm using noveau drivers.

Thank you.

L

leclairm

Newcomer

Can you please implement support for the XDG Screencast portal and PipeWire screen sharing so that wayland users can use the software properly. Asking them to roll back in time and drop wayland is not an acceptable solution. The software should run on the latest Linux distributions.

J

JoergP

Newcomer

Completely second that! Seemingly the native Linux client (I'm on v5.8.0) uses private API which has been shut down starting from Gnome version 41. Time to switch to a proper and officially supported API, which is the XDG Screencast portal, combined with PipeWire screen sharing.

E

es-kyra

Newcomer

Zoom incorrectly implemented their screensharing on modern gnu+linux distributions which use Wayland. Zoom did not introduce Wayland support until March 1, 2020 version 3.5.361976.0301. This was broken upon release because they did not use the correct API (gdbus-org.freedesktop.portal.ScreenCast) which has been available since early 2018: https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/releases/tag/0.10

Many users are switching to affordable, reliable, backed-by-open-source options like https://8x8.vc, powered by Jitsi (plus, they didn't lie to their users about end-to-end encryption and get sued). At the beginning of the Wayland project, there was only a screenshot API, not an actual screenrecording one. The screenshot API exists only for the system to take screenshots (of course). It is very inefficient for video but what's worse is it is also completely insecure because in order for it to be publicly enabled, applications have full access to record your entire screen without explicit permission.

The correct API was designed for video, and gives the user control over sharing specific windows/apps or the entire screen, so no app gets to spy on your screen without your permission. So when Zoom created their implementation they used the wrong API, and for the almost two years since then Zoom still didn't update, ignored the users with issues, did not monitor for deprecating APIs, and did not test upcoming gnu+linux distributions like Fedora to see that the API they use was incorrect, long been deprecated, and imminently disabled. This left many users and developers to do the testing and investigation for them, but still took nine months to be recognized. Finally, they are working on this now, so we will see how long the fix takes.

See: https://community.zoom.com/t5/Meetings/Wayland-screen-sharing-broken-with-GNOME-41-on-Fedora-35/m-p/31852