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Comment by smallerfish | Hacker News Reader

Flameshot is fantastic. More distros should make it the default.

Gnome has their own screenshot tool and they also broke the workflow for Flameshot on Wayland recently. The internal API that was used to take screenshots was blocked, which is reasonable in and of itself, however the new public API has an animation, after which a special window opens and requires you to click a "share" button before Flameshot can work with the screenshot. You need to go through that every time you use Flameshot.

I like that they think of security, but this is the type of thing that forces people back to X11. Their own screenshot tool does not adhere to the same workflow, so maybe they are blind to the issue.

Considering that Gnome is now the default DE for the more popular distros, I doubt Flameshot will ever receive the honor of becoming the default screenshot tool, even though it should. It provides most of the capabilities that a user would need when taking a screenshot. Desktop Linux needs these little goodies, so it can be sold to the average user.

If you want to use a custom screen shot tool, you are not the target audience for gnome.

KDE has its own snapshot tool which is called Spectacle and is pretty solid.

Given the level of integration between KDE apps it's unlikely they will prefer an outside tool either.

How is Spectacle better integrated than Flameshot?

It has KDE's help, hotkeys, settings, etc...

Standardizing some tooling across major DEs would be a smart move, but I get the political impediments to doing so. Reinventing the wheel isn't always the right move. Flameshot's superior to either Gnome or KDE's defaults. (Another example - gnome-calculator is superior to kcalc, and there are probably better more obscure calendars out there too.)

> however the new public API has an animation, after which a special window opens and requires you to click a "share" button before Flameshot can work with the screenshot. You need to go through that every time you use Flameshot.

This is indeed very frustrating.

Something related is in the works for screenshares, a "remember this decision" option. https://feaneron.com/2021/11/13/adventures-with-portals/ At some point maybe something similar will come up for screenshots.

On a related note, GNOME Shell 42 should have a nice new screenshot integration: https://thisweek.gnome.org/posts/2021/12/twig-24/#gnome-shel...

> Their own screenshot tool does not adhere to the same workflow, so maybe they are blind to the issue.

Which isn't surprising, in the least. I agree with aidenn0, if you're using a custom screenshot tool, you're not using GNOME as it's intended to be used.

Here's another fun fact, their music player doesn't have a volume control and that's how they think end users should use it.

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