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How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition

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Re: How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition

#3

Post by AshamedCaptain »

Most desktop Linuxes are changing and deprecating APIs way too fast for the usual glacial development flow of a big commercial software company.

The fact that apparently the API for Wayland/Flatpak screen recording is less than 5 years old and it still does not work on X11 desktops does not inspire a lot of confidence, either.

However, desktop video calls and screencasting is one area where I think the free and open source alternatives are up to the task.

Re: How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition

#4

Post by suby »

I still cannot run a Wayland session on my machine w/ an nvidia 3080 with the latest drivers. It either fails to boot (KDE) or runs at about 15 FPS (Gnome).

It seems a little unreasonable to be this mad at a company for not supporting an environment that doesn't work for the vast majority of hardware out there. Especially given that you can just use Zoom within Firefox.

Re: How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition

#6

Post by Fabricio20 »

I believe this is not entirely Zoom's fault, I've heard a few horror stories with Wayland and screensharing over the last few years. Particularly when I once tried using OBS Studio and it just didn't work on Wayland. I also remember screenshare from things like Google Meet or Discord only being able to share other chromium tabs and not able to share the desktop or any specific applications.

This whole story sounds to me like some engineer at Zoom was tasked with fixing "linux" back in 2020 and after having several issues similar to what I described (possibly unable to capture other applications?) they decided that quickly screenshotting the screen was a good enough fix. Sadly linux still represents a minority of users so this issue was probably not prioritized as necessary.

Re: How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition

#9

Post by jatone »

Fabricio20 wrote: post #6

I believe this is not entirely Zoom's fault, I've heard a few horror stories with Wayland and screensharing over the last few years. Particularly when I once tried using OBS Studio and it just didn't work on Wayland. I also remember screenshare from things like Google Meet or Discord only being able to share other chromium tabs and not able to share the desktop or any specific applications. This whole story sounds to…

its entirely zoom's fault. the apis they should be using have been well known and in use for years before they used the improper APIs.

chrome's (and by extension every electron app) issues stem from the fact it had not updated to use the screencasting APIs. afaik they've been updated.

abusing APIs isn't the right way to go here. and zoom is entirely at fault for it. they should have used the correct (and known) apis and worked with upstreams to get the support in place. then they could have properly pointed to upstream and said 'it won't work until these issues are fixed' and provided resources to fix them.

as a result now they are in a shit position of having a completely broken app when the APIs in question do work. I know because I've built a screencasting program on top of them to cast my desktop to chromecast.

Re: How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition

#10

Post by tapoxi »

suby wrote: post #4

I still cannot run a Wayland session on my machine w/ an nvidia 3080 with the latest drivers. It either fails to boot (KDE) or runs at about 15 FPS (Gnome). It seems a little unreasonable to be this mad at a company for not supporting an environment that doesn't work for the vast majority of hardware out there. Especially given that you can just use Zoom within Firefox.

This is just an Nvidia issue, they spent years trying to push their own driver model and have only recently come around.
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