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Comment by heavyset_go | Hacker News Reader

This is the way.

I used to "hate" Wayland, but that was because I was stuck on an ancient kwin_wayland implementation that didn't get updated for years on Ubuntu.

When it comes to big changes like Wayland and Pipewire, you really want the latest versions you can get. Like the OP, I only use rolling releases on my machines for that reason.

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Even as of Ubuntu 24.04 there's still plenty of stuff that's just broken. Can't stream my screen from Discord, can't share my screen from Firefox. Weird color problems with my calibrated monitor. Switching to Xorg solved all of these issues.

I'm open to moving to Debian testing/unstable if Wayland can actually deliver. What do you run?

    can't share my screen from Firefox

Did you install Firefox manually or do you use the Firefox Snap that's provided by Ubuntu?

Regardless, that's still a huge Linux usability issue when the user needs to know for sure the specific source to install a friggin web browser where screen sharing works.

Indeed, though not so much Linux but rather a Ubuntu-specific issue. Most (all?) other distributions don't distribute Firefox as a Snap, so screen sharing will work out of the box.

Oh I absolutely agree. I've seen way too many people fall into this trap, install Firefox from Snap, Zoom client from Snap, what could possibly go wrong? Turns out, quite a lot!

My CachyOS / KDE install with pure Wayland has been buttery smooth and recently got an update that finally lets me calibrate the max brightness of my HDR OLED monitor (which was the monitor's fault. Not even Windows could make it work properly for non-games until now). CachyOS is also the first distro I've used in years that does things close enough to way I like out of the box that I haven't bothered to update my system reinstall script in months.

I've also been giving Bazzite to some non-tech people who have not once asked for help. That one is immutable and Wayland only, so it's a further testament to how far Wayland has come if you're on an up-to-date-enough system.

Sadly, I'm stuck on older Ubuntu for my work laptop because the mandated security software won't run on anything better.

What is the mandated security software? I’m asking to avoid it in my own org.

I've had to patch the .desktop file in debian for killbots to make it start via x11 because the wayland one was unplayable.

Yeah, I wouldn't even bother with Wayland on Ubuntu unless it works out of the box.

I'm on an unholy amalgamation of Arch/Cachy/Endeavour now, but I have been using screen sharing nearly everyday on calls via Firefox on Arch for about a year and it's worked without a problem.

I considered Debian testing, and it does work well on servers, but a true rolling release is more convenient. The software release and update loop is shorter, it's really nice to be able to pull fixes to packages in a reasonable amount of time after they're released.

Debian testing (without security updates from unstable) is a no-go for servers as you are getting no timely security updates. https://wiki.debian.org/DebianTesting#Considerations

Try Fedora 42 KDE (or its atomic equivalent Kinoite). It works very well.

> you really want the latest versions you can get

> Even as of Ubuntu 24.04

I get that this is the current LTS release, but clearly this isn't want the parent poster had in mind. Notably 24.04 never shipped Plasma 6, which carried a lot of critical Wayland fixes.

None of this is a problem on Debian stable. I even run discord as a Flatpak - screen share works fine. I believe there's systems for that now (way pipe? xdg stuff?)

Ubuntu 24.04 is older than Debian stable currently.

> I believe there's systems for that now (way pipe? xdg stuff?)

You need to get portals working correctly for screensharing to work

It just works on newer distros in my experience. There's no config or anything, including with containerization like flatpak.

Been my experience as well. There was a short period where older distros needed some hacks for things to work smoothly if it worked at all.

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