Screen-sharing in a Wayland Session

With X11 now pretty much in maintenance mode, Wayland has been the default in GNOME for some time now. With the restrictions and confinement that most of us have been subject to for weeks now with COVID-19 many of us have been working from home and have been using apps like Jitsi, Teams and Zoom for work.

I thought the following might be useful for anyone on this forum who has a requirement to screen-share. With PipeWire https://pipewire.org/ maturing I wanted to do some testing to see how screen-sharing support on Wayland is progressing.

If you are in a Wayland session, you can screen-share your entire desktop not just your browser or tab by using Jitsi Meet https://meet.jit.si/ in the following web browsers:

Firefox (currently works on latest stable version 75 and Fedora 32)

Google Chrome (currently works on Beta version 83 which will be Stable on May 19 and Fedora 32). For Chrome you need to enable WebRTC PipeWire support in chrome://flags

Instead of Jitsi you can also use Microsoft Teams or Zoom

Microsoft Teams https://teams.microsoft.com/ is not supported in Firefox for video and audio calls for any OS (it works for instant messaging) but in Google Chrome Beta 83 it currently works for video and audio calls on Linux as thankfully it uses WebRTC so as above if you enable WebRTC PipeWire support you can screen-share your entire desktop

As with Microsoft Teams, Zoom https://zoom.us/ has the best browser support in Google Chrome and again you can screen-share your entire desktop if you use Google Chrome Beta 83 with WebRTC PipeWire support enabled. A very useful extension to use here is Zoom Redirector which prevents you from being directed to download the client application and redirects you straight into the meeting in your web browser instead: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/zoom-redirector/fmaeeiocbalinknpdkjjfogehkdcbkcd/related

Please also see Christian Schaller’s blog for latest update on PipeWire: Christian F.K. Schaller | Blog talking about Fedora, GNOME, GStreamer and related topics. Anything I write in this blog is me speaking as a member of the open source community, official Red Hat communication happens on Redhat.com. The comments are my own personal opinion.

I hope the above helps

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I tried to record desktop under Fedora 32 Workstation but no success so far. The easiest was just switch to x11 and use any utility where there are several available. As of writing this post the only solution for Wayland I found was to compile branch of OBS Studio together with plugin as stated here: OBS Studio for Wayland

I am also working remotely, and using Fedora Silverblue in my work. Currently I am stuck at x11 because I have to use screen sharing in Skype much times, and it is not working in Wayland. So, if Fedora will drop support for x11, I will not upgrade untill Skype gets support for screen sharing in Wayland.

Hi Jakub,

Are you using Skype in your web browser or are you using the app?

I am using an app installed in flatpak.