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by tapoxi 741 days ago
I can see it now...

"How do I share my screen?"

"Well grandma, the Google Chrome Flatpak you're using defaults to Xorg so it runs in XWayland, which means it can't see the desktop because the rest of your shell is native in Wayland. If you go to chrome://flags and set prefered-ozone-platform to wayland it might work, but some people in this reddit thread also mention you need to install xdg-desktop-portal-gnome so it can call the screensharing API in GNOME. This also might not work in the Flatpak at all and maybe just the RPM."

3 comments

I usually use my Linux workstation headlessly at work, but maybe once a year I turn on the screen. It's an entirely different GUI each time. Last time this somehow had to do with the Xorg vs Wayland thing, which also partially broke Chrome Remote Desktop. It's hilarious.
Oh, and for screen sharing for support, I use the built-in Remote Desktop functionality (RDP). I have set up a Wireguard connection from the laptop to my home network which makes it possible for me to jump at any time in without 'grandma' having to do anything. Such an improvement over TeamViewer (which also had trouble with Wayland for a long time, maybe still does?).

Remote support is a breeze now, and we save the usual 30 minutes of guiding an update of TeamViewer over the phone (because of an old and incompatible version) etc.

Yeah, this used to be a problem, but it has been working fine since Fedora 39. I can share a single window or the whole screen with the video conferencing tools I'm using, mainly Signal, sometimes Google Meet, Teams (both in Firefox running natively on Wayland) and Zoom.

Flatpak has made it so easy to install most common apps, just press the Super key, search for the app, click on it in the list and "Install". Usually takes less than 10-30 seconds from start 'till the app is installed and running. Very grandma-proof, actually!

EDIT: But I will say that the road to where GNOME / Fedora is today has been a bumpy ride, like a car that is under maintenance while driving :) It's the FOSS / Linux way. In the end, the result is actually quite amazing and user friendly.