Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition

write.as

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 223 posts

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

#21

Post by shadowgovt »

jatone wrote: post #9
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…

Zoom is not as big a company as people think... They're just hustling very hard relative to the sudden explosion of use of their tools.

I'd be willing to wager money that their development process involved attempting to use the correct API, finding that it either failed on a key executive's machine or the developers' own machines (possibly because of one bad driver/hardware/os configuration) but because it didn't work for single key player, they had to invent a work around with a worse solution that worked on the spanning set of architectures they needed it to work on.

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

#22

Post by pdimitar »

boudin wrote: post #18
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.

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.

> The good news is that Nvidia has finally decided to fix its drivers, it's still beta though.

Can you elaborate on that?

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

#23

Post by onli »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #17
jatone wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Was Pipewire even on distros by the time they decided to "abuse the one API"?

No. Pipewire only arrived on the most unstable distros end of last year. It's in no way available for all, and not a common standard (yet). And you are right, wayland in general is not the norm yet. I'd even say it's likely to never replace X11 completely, given its shortcomings and X11's stability.

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

#24

Post by shadowgovt »

DarthNebo wrote: post #7

Not surprised at all. Instead of making use of the WebRTC API in the browser, they just threw us back to Skype days of needing a native client installed on your OS....

WebRTC implementations haven't converged yet. Roll your own app, or trust to the winds of multiple browser developers and rely on a library produced by Google that you may not have the resources to fix if it breaks on a key hardware / software configuration? No good choices here, only trade-offs.

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

#25

Post by Arkanosis »

pdimitar wrote: post #22
boudin wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The good news is that Nvidia has finally decided to fix its drivers, it's still beta though. Can you elaborate on that?

I assume GP was thinking of Nvidia having started to work on the GBM API, available starting with nvidia 495.44: https://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults.aspx/181274/en...

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

#26

Post by teddyh »

presz wrote: post #8

People still call it GNU+Linux? Modern distros have less GNU pieces on each iteration. Might as well start calling it Gnome+Linux from now on.

“that is not the deepest way to consider the question.”

— https://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html

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

#27

Post by YEwSdObPQT »

People are saying this is Zoom's fault. Maybe it is. However I've given up on Wayland entirely and just gone back to X11.

I frequently need to record my screen to show bugs or fixes in features. Most of the open source screen recording software seems to only support X11. I've tried quite a few different open source alternatives (other than the built Gnome Screen recorder which is kinda hidden in a keyboard short-cut and it absolutely useless as I have to crop the video afterwards).

Slack and Discord can't share the whole screen. Not much of an issue with Discord. But with Slack sometimes I need to demo my whole screen and it doesn't work with Wayland enabled in Gnome.

So this isn't a problem just for zoom. It seems other software has problems with this as well.

Also with Wayland I have weird issues when using a browser (doesn't matter which one I've tried them all) if the memory usage on my dev machine goes up over 32gb (I have 64GB installed). Wayland starts to slow down. Windows seems to start becomes randomly unresponsive and scrolling keeps hitching. It isn't the CPU time because I ran top and the CPU usage was fine.

Before anyone tells me not to use a Nvidia card or Do I have the right drivers installed etc. I am using kernel 5.10 on debian 11 (bullseye) and I have a AMD 6800XT. I have the correct firmware installed and I played Rise of the Tomb Raider (linux native games) recently at 4k with absolutely no problems (I have one crash in 40 hours of gameplay). So it not the card or the drivers.

I've basically given up using Wayland. The only issue I've had was screen tearing in Dark Souls 3 and a few other games that were being played via proton and that was solved by enabling TearFree in an Xorg conf file.

    cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-amd.conf

    Section "Device"
        Identifier  "AMD"
        Driver      "amdgpu"
        Option      "TearFree" "true"
    EndSection
People keep on saying Wayland is better, X11 is rubbish. But I frequently find the opposite. I know there are security issues. But I need the full screen record and I've tried almost everything and none of the software (open or proprietary) I've tried works properly with Wayland.

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

#28

Post by boudin »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #19
boudin wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

We're not talking about supporting things years ago though, we're talking about supporting it now which is a few years after, when it's been stable and supported across the whole ecosystem for a quite a while.

That's their job, providing multi-platform video-conferencing and screen sharing. If they can't do that they could chose to drop their app and try to build a decent web version instead because this thing is quite an horror show as well. Screen sharing works well in Chromium and Firefox.

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

#30

Post by AshamedCaptain »

DarthNebo wrote: post #7

Not surprised at all. Instead of making use of the WebRTC API in the browser, they just threw us back to Skype days of needing a native client installed on your OS....

Really? They're the only commercial company that bothers to create a native client (and not a Electron app) and you complain that you would prefer to have no client at all?

I don't think that's the majority opinion...

I'm no fan of them (I think free apps are up to the task), but give me a native client _any day_ over something that runs in a browser. I don't want any more multi-GB RAM hoarding processes running 24h on my desktop.

Post reply on HN