How not to code an HTML page by hand.
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How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition
11–20 of 223 posts
Re: How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition
#12I 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.
While this doesn't detract from your argument given the timelines; if you're on Arch, try again. I believe it was yesterday that the one major Qt fix that made Wayland KDE usable on Nvidia landed.
Apparently Sway too has worked fine since the release of Nvidia drivers with GBM support. I'm on AMD right now so can't confirm.
Re: How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition
#13I 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.
I've been using Zoom on Gnome almost daily in the last three years. I've basically no problem with video conference itself. Video just works for me. But audio is a never ending story. Zoom randomly selects other audio devices, when I quit one video session and start another. Sometimes, I have to to quit zoom and start it again. Sometimes I have to disconnect my table speaker/microphone to be able to use it in zoom again. It still works with every other software I've tried. When I start zoom, I get the dialog to share crash information 95% of the times I start zoom. Zoom is not able to store my account password or even the username under linux. So, when I open my macbook, it's zoom client wakes up, disconnects my zoom client on linux and I have to go fetch my zoom password from 1password once more. The zoom client under linux fails to safe room passwords all the time. The Zoom client makes it extra hard to call it with command line args to open a special room including password immediately. I could go on. It is just a huge pain in the ... . But most "entreprise grade" competitors are far worse.
Re: How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition
#14Most 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…
flat out incorrect in this case. this has nothing to do with a deprecated API. they just decided to abuse one API when there was an API available for their use case available.
x11 is no long maintained expecting an modern API to support it is foolish.
Re: How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition
#15I 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.
While this doesn't detract from your argument given the timelines; if you're on Arch, try again. I believe it was yesterday that the one major Qt fix that made Wayland KDE usable on Nvidia landed. Apparently Sway too has worked fine since the release of Nvidia drivers with GBM support. I'm on AMD right now so can't confirm.
As an nvidia hostage I can confirm that arch and sway works.
(currently works out of the box with nouveau, I think I previously had to mess around with the proprietary driver and wayland-eglstreams. That stopped working around when the new driver with GBM support was released I think. uninstalling the eglstreams and switching to nouveau fixed it)
Re: How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition
#16Most 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…
At the same time, it's because they don't care much. I'm quite sure that if Microsoft or Apple would change the way screen-sharing works between version of their OS, Zoom wouldn't wait 2 years to look at it.
I understand it's not as much market share, but it does make Zoom look really poor in tech companies where using Linux is more common.
It's also quite shameful for a company where the main thing they do is video conference and screen sharing, it's not like it's a small side feature.
Also you make it sounds like it changes every other day, but that's not the case. Screen sharing in wayland has been stable for a while now and it's adopted by all major compositors (mutter, kwin, wlroots).
As you mentioned, it's pretty well supported by a lot of open source software other than Zoom, so there's plenty of implementation examples they can go through as well.
Re: How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition
#17Most 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…
flat out incorrect in this case. this has nothing to do with a deprecated API. they just decided to abuse one API when there was an API available for their use case available. x11 is no long maintained expecting an modern API to support it is foolish.
Was Pipewire even on distros by the time they decided to "abuse the one API" ?
Even I have had to resort to abusing the one API, and it was just for taking the values of a couple pixels on the screen. Everything else is just too slow, requires setting up way too much infrastructure (e.g. PipeWire! a H264 encoder!), or has been fixed "last year" or some other uselessly recent date.
X11 is no longer maintained is also flat-out wrong, and I'm willing to bet, it's still the most used option (since even on the distros which use Wayland, in-place updates do not usually turn it on). The fact that today's screencast API does not even bother to implement support for the most used window server out there does not inspire confidence, either.
Re: How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition
#18I 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.
Most people uses intel igpus no?
There's a good nvidia population but it's not the majority, especially in a work environment.
The good news is that Nvidia has finally decided to fix its drivers, it's still beta though.
Re: How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition
#19Most 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…
At the same time, it's because they don't care much. I'm quite sure that if Microsoft or Apple would change the way screen-sharing works between version of their OS, Zoom wouldn't wait 2 years to look at it. I understand it's not as much market share, but it does make Zoom look really poor in tech companies where using Linux is more common. It's also quite shameful for a company where the main thing they do is video…
Even stuff such as OBS Studio was significantly slower on Wayland than on X11, at least until the efforts done _last year_ (e.g. https://feaneron.com/2021/03/30/obs-studio-on-wayland/ ) . Single-Window support for screencast API is also only a couple years old! Before that it would just error out, even if the D-Bus interface was there ( https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal-gtk/blob/b2b5e... ).
That's why I say that it just moves way too fast for the glacial speed that commercial houses normally have. For at least 2 years (thinking 2016-2018) some distros were even shipping Wayland _without_ an actual working screen capture API. How do you even support those ?
Re: How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition
#20I 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.
Most people uses intel igpus no? There's a good nvidia population but it's not the majority, especially in a work environment. The good news is that Nvidia has finally decided to fix its drivers, it's still beta though.
Thank you, that's a fair point. I was only considering the AMD vs Nvidia marketshare.