To get screen sharing in Slack to properly work under Wayland, you need to explicitly tell Slack to use PipeWire for screen capturing. Copy Slack’s desktop file from /usr/share/applications/slack.desktop to ~/.local/share/applications/slack.desktop and modify the Exec line to look like:
Exec=/usr/bin/slack --enable-features=WebRTCPipeWireCapturer %U
Now restart Slack and screen sharing should work properly.
tmux 3.2 and above provides the copy-command option to set a command to pipe text to copy. You will also need wl-copy command from the wl-clipboard package. Add the following line to your ~/.tmux.conf:
set -s copy-command 'wl-copy'
As of writing this post, tmux-3.2 is only available in experimental, so you’ll need to install it from there:
$ sudo apt install -t experimental tmux
Zoom has a native Linux client which supports screen sharing in Wayland, at least on some platforms. Today when I tried to start a Share Screen I encountered the following error:
Can not start share, we only support Wayland on GNOME with Ubuntu 17 and above, Fedora 25 and above, Debian 9 and above, CentOS 8 and above, OpenSUSE Leap 15 and above, Oracle Linux 8 and above, Arch Linux, AnterGos, Manjaro. If your OS is not on the list, please use x11 instead.
The feature works for me when I’m using Debian Stable (Buster), and also worked for the short while I’ve used Debian Testing (Bullseye). So, I guessed that the feature is broken due to wrong OS version detection. The fix is easy: Remove /etc/os-release (which is by default a symlink to /usr/lib/os-release) and append to the original contents the following lines:
VERSION_ID="99" VERSION="99 (sid)" VERSION_CODENAME="sid"
So the entire file should look like:
PRETTY_NAME="Debian GNU/Linux bullseye/sid" NAME="Debian GNU/Linux" ID=debian HOME_URL="https://www.debian.org/" SUPPORT_URL="https://www.debian.org/support" BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.debian.org/" VERSION_ID="99" VERSION="99 (sid)" VERSION_CODENAME="sid"
When I first encountered the error, I guessed Zoom doesn’t actually attempt the Share Screen, but relies on a pre-configured list of supported distros and (minimal) versions. It worked for me with Debian Stable (10) and Testing (11), but what version number is Unstable? Debian Unstable doesn’t have a version number associated with it, so it must be the problem.
A quick strace revealed how Zoom retrieves the current distro name and version:
$ strace -f -tt zoom
...
107498 11:20:58.943764 openat(AT_FDCWD, "/etc/os-release", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC
107513 11:20:58.943771 futex(0x565257f88760, FUTEX_WAIT_BITSET_PRIVATE|FUTEX_CLOCK_REALTIME, 0, {tv_sec=1592727659, tv_nsec=303765000}, FUTEX_BITSET_MATCH_ANY
107498 11:20:58.943779 <… openat resumed>) = 17
107498 11:20:58.943787 fcntl(17, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = 0
107498 11:20:58.943802 fstat(17, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=200, …}) = 0
107498 11:20:58.943817 read(17, "PRETTY_NAME=\"Debian GNU/Linux bu"…, 200) = 200
...
As you can see Zoom reads (and probably later parses) the entire /etc/os-release file. This file contains identification data for the current running distro including name and version. Because Debian Sid doesn’t have the version variables set, Zoom erroneously misinterpret it as an old version instead of the newest. Thus, it refuses to enable the Share Screen feature. Adding the relevant version variables solves this issue.
See also: man os-release (5)
Recently I noticed xdg-open started failing opening links in Firefox. Giving me the following error:
Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system.
It happened while I had Firefox running and responding to everything else. I’m running the latest stable Firefox (74 as I’m writing this) on Wayland. Wayland brings a lot of good things, but also a lot of interoperability problems, so I suspected it had something to do with it. Thanks to Martin Stransky I found out that the solution is to set the MOZ_DBUS_REMOTE environment variable prior to launching Firefox. If you are using a desktop file to launch Firefox, you can set the variable in the Exec line like this:
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Firefox
Exec=env MOZ_DBUS_REMOTE=1 MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 /home/guyru/.local/firefox/firefox %u
X-MultipleArgs=false
Icon=firefox-esr
Categories=Network;WebBrowser;
Terminal=false
MimeType=text/html;text/xml;application/xhtml+xml;application/xml;application/vnd.mozilla.xul+xml;application/rss+xml;application/rdf+xml;image/gif;image/jpeg;image/png;x-scheme-handler/http;x-scheme-handler/https;
You will need to restart Firefox before the fix will take affect.