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Xwayland Video Bridge created to improve Linux screen sharing

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With the move between X11 and Wayland still ongoing, and likely won't finish for years, problems keep coming up like screen sharing but XwaylandVideoBridge may help solve this.

This new tool written by Aleix Pol and David Edmundson is designed to allow much easier sharing of screens and windows between X11 and Wayland, which should help to ease the transition from X11 to Wayland. The problem is that currently in the likes of Discord, MS Teams, Slack, Zoom and others that you run through Xwayland, you may end up with a black screen and no windows listed — this should solve it.


Picture credit: David Edmundson

Hopefully in future things like this won't be needed, as everything moves over to Wayland. Still, it's good to have tools available for legacy apps that won't get updated and great for the next few transition years. 

As the developers on it say it should work "on any desktop that supports the Xdg desktop portals and pipewire streaming and have a working system tray".

Read more in the blog post and see it on GitLab.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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ripper81358 Mar 27, 2023
I tried it and it worked on my end with Kubuntu 22.10 and Plasma 5.27. As of now some Apps are only working with it when installed as native packages. There seems to be a problem with universal packages (Snaps and Flatpaks) in some cases.

Developers of Electron based Apps should upgrade to newer Electron releases and enable pipewire. Pipewire runs on Wayland and X11. There are also other reasons besides linuxspecific stuff to keep Electron up to date. Older Electron releases have a very long list of security issues. This should have been fixed for a long time.
MayeulC Mar 27, 2023
Quoting: melkemindWill this finally allow steam remote play to work properly in Wayland?

It should already work if started with -pipewire :) (or -pipewire-dma-buf for more efficiency, but please double check as this is from memory).
Marlock Mar 27, 2023
Quoting: ripper81358I tried it and it worked on my end with Kubuntu 22.10 and Plasma 5.27. As of now some Apps are only working with it when installed as native packages. There seems to be a problem with universal packages (Snaps and Flatpaks) in some cases.

Developers of Electron based Apps should upgrade to newer Electron releases and enable pipewire. Pipewire runs on Wayland and X11. There are also other reasons besides linuxspecific stuff to keep Electron up to date. Older Electron releases have a very long list of security issues. This should have been fixed for a long time.
Looking at how browsers need constant and swift updates to avoid hackers,it's pretty obvious Electron apps should be using an OS-provided electron component that gets updated regardless of any effort by each electron-based app dev... but then they'd probably break all the time because those apps usually do hackish things instead of strictly adhering to standards and use browser-component version freezing as if it were a valid solution to those breakages and not a menace.
MayeulC Mar 28, 2023
Quoting: Marlock
Quoting: ripper81358I tried it and it worked on my end with Kubuntu 22.10 and Plasma 5.27. As of now some Apps are only working with it when installed as native packages. There seems to be a problem with universal packages (Snaps and Flatpaks) in some cases.

Developers of Electron based Apps should upgrade to newer Electron releases and enable pipewire. Pipewire runs on Wayland and X11. There are also other reasons besides linuxspecific stuff to keep Electron up to date. Older Electron releases have a very long list of security issues. This should have been fixed for a long time.
Looking at how browsers need constant and swift updates to avoid hackers,it's pretty obvious Electron apps should be using an OS-provided electron component that gets updated regardless of any effort by each electron-based app dev... but then they'd probably break all the time because those apps usually do hackish things instead of strictly adhering to standards and use browser-component version freezing as if it were a valid solution to those breakages and not a menace.

Well, PWA are also a thing :)

I was pleasantly surprised to see that homeassistant provides one, for instance. They are a good middle ground between my "only foss apps" policy and "you must use the app" services.
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