Ways to share screen with Electron based apps without login to Xorg session

Ask Fedora
, , ,
1

Lately sharing screen is kind of necessary for me. And most of these apps are Chromium based. It works in Xorg sessions but Not Wayland. Is there any way to share screen and windows with apps like Discord or similar without logging out and changing sessions? I use laptop and Wayland is much better experience for me than Xorg. So if possible, I would like to remain in Wayland session.

2

It’s not so much an issue of XOrg vs Wayland as much as if the app is using a client or legacy API call to do it. Zoom, for example, was using (abusing, rather) the screenshot API to do it, which Gnome recently removed as unsafe and insecure. There are newer API calls that work with either. This isn’t really an electron issue, in and of itself, since you can share screen with Google Meet or Nextcloud Talk, etc, in a browser with Wayland, but rather if the application itself is using a current implementation or not.

1 Like
3

For applications that have not adapted yet to PipeWire+Portal based screen sharing, you can use XWaylandVideoBridge to expose it to those applications using the legacy X11 based screen sharing. You can install the xwaylandvideobridge package to use it. It is preloaded in Fedora KDE since Fedora 39, but usable on any Wayland desktop.

This requires StatusNotifierItem (SNI) support in your desktop, which all major desktops support out of the box except GNOME. For GNOME, you will need to do the following:

  1. Install the AppIndicator extension (it supports SNI as well) by installing the gnome-shell-extension-appindicator package.
  2. Enable the extension: gnome-extensions enable appindicatorsupport@rgcjonas.gmail.com

Once this is in place, you can launch XWaylandVideoBridge and it should show up in your status tray area. You can then configure what to expose to an XWayland application for screensharing.

1 Like
4

Should this thread be closed even after a 2yr Necro? Considering Neal’s post being really relevant though?

5

I am closing it because of the age. His post may be relevant but is nor applicable to this thread since the thread seems to have been related to either f34 or f35 and would probably have been using gnome 3.8 so that extension package would not have been available back then.
.
I would suggest that if neal wishes to have a currently relevant thread he should open a new thread and link back to this one as possibly applicable.

I did a search for the indicated package and it did not show for either of those fedora releases.

I also note that his command in step 2 to enable that extension explicitly uses a invalid hostname with a gmail.com domain address so I doubt this is a legitimate post.

Closing the thread and reporting the post.