So let’s talk about this Wayland thing
So let’s talk about this Wayland thing
Wayland. It comes up a lot: “Bug X fixed in the Plasma Wayland session.” “The Plasma Wayland session has now gained support for feature Y.” And it’s in the news quite …
Wayland. It comes up a lot: “Bug X fixed in the Plasma Wayland session.” “The Plasma Wayland session has now gained support for feature Y.” And it’s in the news quite …
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Don't let Slack launch at startup. As long as it launches after pipewire - everything works. Your can also restart it to fix sharing issue, but that can be a birch if you already started a call.
Is there a way to control the launch order? I suppose you could also find a script that waits for a given process to be responsive before launching another, but I'm not sure where I'd insert that either.
(I've been using Ubuntu mostly out-of-the-box so far and just now started having the time and energy to start learning about and fiddling with the internals)
If it launches via a systemd service, you can perhaps edit the file such that it depends on Pipewire before it launches.
Or disable the built in startup support and create your own service that does the same.
I'm not sure that would work. Pipewire probably starts via system (just takes a while to become functional) and slack is started by KDE. I guess you could just add a delay to slack's start, but I just start it by hand.
Starting by hand is fine and I do it with just about anything I need anyway (though I suspect there is still some startup bloat I'll need to sort out, if I don't set up an entirely new system somewhere down the line), but don't underestimate my compulsion to automate what I can (or at least know how to).
I'm a sucker for automation for automation's sake :D
That has nothing to do with Slack's screen sharing issues. Screen sharing was broken due to Electron bugs and it's fixed in Slack 4.34.
I'd argue lazy choice of wrapping your website inside chrome instead of building a native app is Slack's issue.
I also wonder whether Slack fixed it or just waited for Google to fix it since Slack seems to only have UI designers and no actual devs on their team. They keep pumping out useless UI changes while actual bugs take years to fix.
Many Electron maintainers are Slack employees. They're contributing upstream more than most other companies that use Electron, especially compared to their size.
Could you name a couple? Genuinely interested to check out their contributions.
Also, I just updated to 4.34.119 and screen sharing is still completely broken. As is typical with Slack.
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As long as it launches after pipewire
Why? Why plasma nailed own screensharing to audio server? There already are wayland extensions for this.
Pioewire handles audio and video pipelines between applications.
So why Wayland instead of pipewire at all?
Because Pipewire only handles and understands media streams, so it can stream the output of a window or the whole desktop, but only because the Wayland compositor has already composed the windows and other data it gets from the application to a visual and hands the final result to Pipewire.
Which goes back to oroginal question. Why pipewire if there are already wayland extensions?
Because it is convenient for programs to use Pipewire for screensharing, as those programs can then also use the same Pipewire support for all their audio and webcam needs. Also Pipewire is good at multiplexing the various media streams.
And what developers will hammer their apps to one sound server implementation? What is convenient here? Loosing interoperability? You always can use Wayland for screensharing, ALSA for sound and V4L2 for webcam.
For the multiplexing, as I mentioned.
A V4L2 camera can only be opened by a single application at a time, but if that application is Pipewire, then Pipewire can allow multiple applications to make use of it simultaneously. Same thing with ALSA, it's the reason sound servers exist at all, though I suspect you're already familiar with that.
I also hear that ALSA has some support for multiple applications per device nowadays, though I understand it is much less pleasant to use than a fully featured sound server.
I also hear that ALSA has some support for multiple applications per device nowadays, though I understand it is much less pleasant to use than a fully featured sound server.
FYI
Many older sound chips had hardware support for mixing multiple streams, and so the alsa drivers for those happily allowed multiple apps to open and write to the /dev/snd/whatever device. Life was good and people got used to doing it this way.
Nowadays (since like 2000 lol), sound chips generally expect a single pre-mixed stream. So the sound device for those is exclusive open. The libalsa devs made it possible to have the first app to open the sound device act as the sound server for every other app that tries to open it later. But it was complicated and fragile and just a bad idea in retrospect.
nowadays
What? Nowdays? Do you live in 2005?
To be fair v4l2 sometimes needs additional processing to allow multiple processes to use same webcam at same time. At least for those applications who use libv4l because I've seen mentions that this is because for some reason libv4l checks that camera is not in use.Reading the fucking manual suggests that V4L2 is totally fine with multiple programs using same webcam without any workarounds, just only one program can set resolution and other stuff.
EDIT: found mentions of dmix in 2004. Will I find mention from 2003 to finish with round number? Also hardware mixing was in ALSA since creation, but it required hardware(thanks, cap).
I started running OBS with a virtual camera to do screen sharing. It is so much nicer to manage sharing with OBS than with Slack/Google Meet/Discord.
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Oh, that sounds like an interesting idea. Currently stuck with teams at work. Screen sharing does work under wayland. But definitely going to try this.
Try using XWayland video bridge. It should allow any XWayland apps to use screen sharing. Unfortunately most distros either don't ship it yet or ship broken versions but you can download nightly Flatpaks from Gitlab CI
I'm not sure why, but every time I use XWayland Video Bridge (installed as of about 2 days ago so it should still be pretty new), I just end up with a black screen being broadcasted - not sure what could be causing that.
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