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Comment by pimeys | Hacker News Reader

I really wish Zoom could start using PipeWire for their screen sharing and video as soon as possible. Currently their desktop app gives a very interesting error if trying to share the screen from Wayland/sway. There is no need to only support Gnome on Ubuntu et.al. with PipeWire.

The only way to use Zoom from my point of view is through their web app. And every time I start a meeting from their web interface, they're using every possible dark pattern to force me to install their official app.

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Their app is really bad. The good news is that their screen sharing based on gnome's private screenshot API should stop working altogether as Gnome 41 is securing those APIs.

Their webapp is quite bad as well though and behind in features especially on Firefox on which, for whatever reason, there's no gallery mode.

They should drop their crap desktop app and focus on building a descent webapp instead.

The weird screenshot thing also leads to confusing issues like this one: https://github.com/flathub/us.zoom.Zoom/issues/223. Zoom tries to avoid sharing its own windows by using an X window property that specifies the owning PID, so it filters out any window where `_NET_WM_PID == Zoom's PID`. In a modern Linux desktop where applications are sandboxed, many different applications can think they have the same PID, so it ends up filtering out other applications.

Not sharing its own windows is nice and all, but I don't think Zoom even does that on other platforms. It's weird how much effort they have put in to doing the wrong thing.

Adding to this I also wish Zoom to use native Pipewire for desktop audio capture, currently Zoom desktop audio sharing doesn't work when pulseaudio is replaced by pipewire

Would obs be helpful here? I would think you could tell zoom about an obs virtual camera and use obs with pipewire for the capture.

Have you tried installing zoom as a flatpak from flathub?

Using it at Fedora Silverblue 34 (Gnome 40 on Wayland) and screen sharing works (using it often at work).

Zoom screen sharing on wayland has been hacked around Gnome's private d-bus screenshot api. It doesn't work in any other environment.

That's not really a big deal, you could just develop a small shim for that d-bus API if you really needed to. But I agree, it would be better for them to switch to Pipewire.

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