The fact that apparently the API for Wayland/Flatpak screen recording is less than 5 years old and it still does not work on X11 desktops does not inspire a lot of confidence, either.
However, desktop video calls and screencasting is one area where I think the free and open source alternatives are up to the task.
It's just very surprising considering how well Linus' philosophy of "never break things backwards" holds up over time, and that the Wayland people appear to have nearly entirely missed this.
x11 is no long maintained expecting an modern API to support it is foolish.
Even I have had to resort to abusing the one API, and it was just for taking the values of a couple pixels on the screen. Everything else is just too slow, requires setting up way too much infrastructure (e.g. PipeWire! a H264 encoder!), or has been fixed "last year" or some other uselessly recent date.
X11 is no longer maintained is also flat-out wrong, and I'm willing to bet, it's still the most used option (since even on the distros which use Wayland, in-place updates do not usually turn it on). The fact that today's screencast API does not even bother to implement support for the most used window server out there does not inspire confidence, either.
No. Pipewire only arrived on the most unstable distros end of last year. It's in no way available for all, and not a common standard (yet). And you are right, wayland in general is not the norm yet. I'd even say it's likely to never replace X11 completely, given its shortcomings and X11's stability.
If the old thing is broken, and the new thing isn't ready yet, then what are we supposed to do? Use Windows I suppose.
Wayland's justification should be a (theoretically) better platform and codebase.
gnome shell has had some version of the screencast API for 8 years now. pipewire is irrelevant to the discussion.
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/blame/main/data...
the first commit for the desktop portal (which is the end result of the gnome api above) for wlr was in 2018.
https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr/commit/4e...
2 years before the 2020 date in the article. so in short: in 2020 zoom abused a gnome only api to implement desktop sharing, when a proper gnome only desktop sharing api already existed for ~8 years. which was the precursor to the current desktop portal stuff and you're trying to blame wayland for the problem.
2. This entire article is about avoiding the Gnome private API. The only other alternative, the XDG/portal API, uses Pipewire. It's literally the only alternative even if you don't use Flatpak.
EDIT: Your "2018" link is also not showing the screencast portal API. And I am not blaming Wayland; I am blaming the distros who switch to it and as a consequence BROKE user programs.
2. the article is about them abusing a gnome only API when alternatives existed that would have worked better. WLR had its first commits for its desktop portal api in 2018, gnome has had some form of the desktop portal api for 8 years now.
if you're going to use a DE only API at least use the right fucking one.
2. "The right fucking" Gnome-exclusive API is, obviously, Gnome-exclusive, and just didn't work for me for the reasons I mentioned in my original message, and probably didn't for them either (my guess because they have a custom H264 encoder for latency/licensing reasons). The "less-Gnome-specific" XDG portal API, Pipewire-based, wasn't really usable when the distro is not even packaging Pipewire.
My go-to conferencing solution is still Jitsi Meet and I am well aware of how crazy the entire situation is, even for browsers.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=XWayland... https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=XWayland...
its dead, the maintainers have said its dead, all major distros have either moved or will be moving in the coming year. x11 as an api will limp along due to xwayland but that's about it.
no amount of assertions will change that unless individuals/organizations step up to actual maintain it.
as for rest of your statement ./shrug I've already been very clear on the fact they were already using a gnome only api incorrectly. the generic desktop portal api not being strictly ready in 2020 due to pipewire doesn't change the fact they had a perfectly reasonable api to use inside gnome and they decided not to and were burned.
Yes it is, the mail you linked at was about a new standalone X server (ie. not XWayland) release by its new maintainer.
> no security fixes
The very previous version released just last month[0] has security fixes.
> or new features are being developed
Two versions before that[1] added a bunch of new features.
[0] https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg/2021-December/060842.html [1] https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg/2021-October/060799.html
Xorg is mostly unmaintained, but still extremely popular, and expecting things to work on it is completely reasonable.
x11 works fine as is, and will continue to do so through xwayland. but don't expect new apis to give a rats ass about x11.
I understand it's not as much market share, but it does make Zoom look really poor in tech companies where using Linux is more common.
It's also quite shameful for a company where the main thing they do is video conference and screen sharing, it's not like it's a small side feature.
Also you make it sounds like it changes every other day, but that's not the case. Screen sharing in wayland has been stable for a while now and it's adopted by all major compositors (mutter, kwin, wlroots).
As you mentioned, it's pretty well supported by a lot of open source software other than Zoom, so there's plenty of implementation examples they can go through as well.
That's why I say that it just moves way too fast for the glacial speed that commercial houses normally have. For at least 2 years (thinking 2016-2018) some distros were even shipping Wayland _without_ an actual working screen capture API. How do you even support those ?
That's their job, providing multi-platform video-conferencing and screen sharing. If they can't do that they could chose to drop their app and try to build a decent web version instead because this thing is quite an horror show as well. Screen sharing works well in Chromium and Firefox.
I blame the distributions that literally _break_ programs one release to the next without even bothering to ensure that the newer API is working.
I will bet that most of Zoom's Linux-using enterprise customer base is still on Redhat6-7 or similarly old releases, and that is where most of their money likely comes from. Note their support pages explicitly claims they still support them.
LTS distribution before that are on X11, so this discussion doesn't even apply, supporting both is definitely possible since they already support X11.
OBS supported Wayland for ~2 years (maybe more, but I've been using it for ~2 years), but you had to install a third party plugin for it, and the app itself was running in Xwayland. The Flatpak version did include the plugin for a while.
And it's not MIGHT work on anything other than Gnome, it DOES.
> And it's not MIGHT work on anything other than Gnome, it DOES.
well, I say that because even thought single-window screencasting now works in Gnome since sometime around last year, when I try to do it on _anything_ else I get a black screen.
And turns out because _as of today_ it is not yet implemented for wlr https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr/blob/c34d...
This stuff is just way too recent and unstable and changing every day.
Pipewire and xdg-desktop are fairly new but not changing every day at all, that's just pure lies. Now that's it's supported by almost all software but zoom, it's unlikely to introduce big breaking changes as well in the future.
If the compositor itself do not support one part of it, it's the problem of the compositor itself, not Zoom, it won't change a thing on Zoom sides. That's exactly the concept behind it being a protocol that abstract the compositor.