Broken screen sharing on Linux Wayland

Steps to reproduce

1. Try to screen share on Linux Wayland with the new 1:1 calling feature.

What happened?

Sharing the full screen or most apps will not work. You might in some cases be able to share other xwayland Chromium based apps, but that’s a guess at best. This issue is not about group calls with embedded Jitsi, that is broken in all Element desktop builds due to https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/4880.

What did you expect?

Chromium and Electron apps like Element currently require passing --enable-features=WebRTCPipeWireCapturer at runtime to enable PipeWire screen sharing on Wayland. This isn’t something most users will know exists, so screen sharing will simply be assumed to be broken with Element on Wayland.

Element should enable this flag at build time so .DEB and Flatpak users can screen share. Jitsi meet electron did so here (not the Jitsi embedded in Element, just a seperate Electron Jitsi package).

As far as I’ve seen, this flag does not cause regressions for X11 users. The expererience with it on Wayland can sometimes have issues, but I think mostly working screen sharing on Wayland by default is better than hardly anything at all.

One issue I noticed is Element seems to have a similar problem as Jitsi Meet Electron, where the preview image is broken even though the share button works.

As discussed extensively here, when on Wayland, devices with dedicated gpus (notably AMD) might experience segfaults when using experimental (not fully enabled by default in any distro I know of) DMA-BUF PipeWire screencasting. Since DMA-BUF screencasting will not be fully enabled by default until issues discussed there are fixed, I don’t see this as blocking for Element.

Operating system

Linux

Application version

Element version: 1.8.1 Olm version: 3.2.3

How did you install the app?

Flatpak, will affect DEB as well.

Have you submitted a rageshake?

No

[vchernin]

@SimonBrandner I’ve just tested build element-nightly-2021081901_amd64 and it works exactly as hoped! This issue can be closed.

Further info: I had to install Debian on a spare laptop, couldn’t find a live DEB-based distros with a live Wayland environment.

The UX isn’t perfect (as mentioned above) but it’s much better than nothing. I’ll open a follow up issue for improving that.

Thanks again!

[vchernin]

You should also be able to do sudo apt install element-desktop-nightly (if on Debian)

I’m not actually on Debian, but I can easily test this in a VM when it’s ready.