Zoom on Linux with Remote Support/Screen Share: Critical Issues

[keithvassallo]

We have a large number of lecturers at our institute wanting to use Linux as their system (primarily, because they're teaching Linux directly or DevOps/develpment and it's nice to be on the same system you're teaching). 

Problem is, Zoom Meetings app is borderline unusable when combined with remote support or screen share. Greatest issues are:

1. When providing remote support to a student, lecturers are unable to type certain keys - such as 's', 'p' and several others. Capitalised versions are fine, however certain keys are interpreted by the remote system as shortcuts. For example, when I press 'p' on the Linux machine, the macOS remote client 'beeps' - same beep as when an invalid key is pressed. Similarly, for example, pressing 'z' on Linux causes Mission Control to appear! This means we can't type anything (such as fixing commands or code) for our students. 

2. When the remote support session is ended, choosing to "Stop remote support" doesn't actually do anything. The only workaround we've found is for the lecturer to start a share themselves just to stop sharing.

Then there's the minor issues such as:

3. Zoom doesn't respect light/dark mode and has no option to use dark mode. 

4. Lecturers have to re-login every time they launch Zoom.

Technical Details

- Lecturers are using the latest Zoom version 6.6.11 (2052). Students are also on the latest respective versions of their macOS/Windows clients.

- Lecturers are using Fedora Linux 43 (primarily). We have tried both the Flatpak and RPM versions of Zoom - both exhibit the same behaviour.  

It would be nice if Zoom started working properly on Linux. I understand the user base must be an insignificant proportion of the overall user base but, ironically, we're having better luck with Microsoft Teams! Come on Zoom... your backend infrastructure is almost entirely Linux - give some love to the client.