Screensharing on zoom calls under wayland

I know there are issues with screensharing and wayland, but some applications seem to be able to do it.

Is there a way to make it work with the zoom app?

I found this post, but I’m not sure if this is the correct solution and the linked github script does not exist anymore. Also, I’m hesitant experimenting with the pipewire config, since last time I tried, my machine stopped booting.

There are two major problems with Zoom under the Wayland + Pipewire environment.

About screen sharing:
The current version of Zoom will not allow you to share your screen under the Wayland session unless you are using GNOME and your system is on their supported OS list. So if you are using KDE, Xfce, or other desktop environments, you probably have to edit your /etc/os-release file, which is believed where Zoom gets your system info from.

About computer sound sharing:
If you are using Pipewire without PulseAudio then sadly there is now no proper way to share your computer sound, because Zoom needs pulseaudio-alsa package to do that, which depends on PulseAudio.

I don’t know what kind of desktop environment you are using, but if you are using KDE (like me), I suggest you just use Zoom with X11 and PulseAudio, it’s the most stable and safe way.

To be honest, I hate Zoom. I remember that last year for a long period, they removed the D-Bus dependency and as result, I couldn’t type in Zoom during that time. (My input method depends on D-Bus)

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Thank you, sorry I forgot to mention, I use Gnome.

I’m not a big fan of Zoom either, but I when I get invited to business calls with clients, I don’t really have a choice :frowning:

According to Zoom official, screen sharing under GNOME Wayland can only share the whole screen or the whiteboard, that is because Zoom actually uses a very stupid way to record your screen, which is rapid screenshots. So you cannot share individual application windows.

You might want to switch your backend to XWayland with GDK_BACKEND=x11 next time you use Zoom. This might help you with your screen sharing.

Check the Arch wiki for more references:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Wayland#GTK

Thanks, I will try that.

So far far it looked like it was able to do whole screen sharing. I could select an screen (monitor) to share it and the little icon showed the content of the screen, however when I select either one, that screen becomes black and basically unusable. Sometimes it shows the menu to end screen sharing, and then everything goes back to normal. But sometimes I have to kill the application to use the screen again.