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Comment by gsich | Hacker News Reader

It is.

It can do screen capture. That doesn't make it a screen capture utility. In the same way as Visual Studio is not a note-taking app, blender3d is not a video editor and Excel is not an IDE.

Sadly people recommend OBS for regular screen capture on Wayland, after X11-based capture apps like SimpleScreenRecorder no longer work on Wayland. And OBS isn't very good at screen recording, and even cropping the recording by dragging a specific region, then shrinking the output file size to this region, cannot be done easily (alt-dragging the bounding box followed by "Resize output (source size)" picks the uncropped source size, and the "Crop/Pad" filter doesn't allow dragging a screen region).

In fact the issue was closed without understanding what the reporter was asking: https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/issues/8822

OBS doesn't work for me on Wayland either.

I log in into X11 when I use OBS on Ubuntu.

It will work under wayland if you have xdg-desktop-portal/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr set up.

If you've got that set up up correctly, screen sharing will also work in Firefox (for instance on discord).

As far as I understand it, xdg-desktop-portal is a DE/WM agnostic protocol that enables applications to easily capture a screen - the user just has to run the right backend for their environment. I think it does other stuff too, but screen recording is probably the main use case.

I'm using Manjaro Sway Edition where that was configured out of the box.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_Desktop_Portal

OBS is the screen capture tool. Unless you define screen capture somewhat differently? Nearly everyone on Twitch (or other streaming sites) is using it.

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