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Comment by ntnsndr | Hacker News Reader

I was speaking at a conference recently and was asked to chair the session at the last minute. It was hybrid, so all the speakers needed to share their slides on Zoom. I have been daily driving Linux for 14 years, and this has almost never been a problem (there was a moment with i3 but it seems better). But I hadn't bothered to test this since installing (and generally loving!) PopOS COSMIC.

The problem, at root, is Wayland. Zoom has some kind of workaround it seems, but it's not working yet in COSMIC.

The result was sad: speakers having to speak with their slides being run by one of the remote speakers, and anyone who recognized the computer running Zoom as Linux surely strengthened their conviction never to try that.

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> anyone who recognized the computer running Zoom as Linux surely strengthened their conviction never to try that.

It always boggles me how supporters of Wayland (or other things that are new and better and worth deprecating the old one for) miss this. It only takes one experience like this to make the average person view Wayland (or Linux as a whole) as a total failure.

Wayland isn't a piece of software. It's a protocol. Compositors that implement it are Gnome's Mutter, KWin, wlroots, hyprland's compositor, and others. COSMIC implements their own compositor too and that's probably where the problem lies...

I use Gnome, and Wayland sessions have been flawless for years. Screen sharing works, everything works.

Also, I've seen colleagues struggle to get screen sharing working on both Windows and Mac; most OSes now don't just allow any program to read from any window, so if someone forgets to allow a permission somewhere, no screen sharing.

https://support.zoom.com/hc/en/article?id=zm_kb&sysparm_arti...

Cosmic is alpha software

I don't want to post the typical "work on my machine" comment, but I regularly see screen sharing failing on almost any platform.

In many in-person conferences in my field they started to request a copy of the pdf file before the talk, that will be projected and shared using a dedicated computer.

I have such failures with Windows. Sometimes need reboot to fix it. It's kinda a running joke that most things in Windows are fixed by rebooting.

> The problem, at root, is Wayland.

Screen sharing worked fine for me on Wayland 3+ years ago (and still works today), so Wayland isn't inherently the issue.

And, as explained, it doesn't matter. The problems, at root, are human psychology and incompatible but popular software, and that's sufficient to drive people away. And the issues are not new: we had exactly that with Windows Vista.

And this is why I don't recommend any DE other than Gnome, and why Gnome is the only desktop supported by corporate distros (RHEL, Suse, Ubuntu).

It's pretty much guaranteed if someone is having issues, they're using a DE that's not Gnome.

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