- The engineering effort to properly support screen sharing on Linux is a _bit_ more complicated than other platforms as we have many DEs
It didn't have to be this way, but somehow the Wayland clique did not realize - or just dug their head in the sand - that things like screenshots or screen sharing are basic table stakes. Instead, they created an academic replacement for X11 and left it upon the community to plug the most obvious gaps.
Understandably, actual users tend to get kind of pissed when you break their computer without offering any replacement except "just quit your job and don't use Zoom" or "wait 10 years for Gnome to add protocol foobar to support it, but they will force you to use this half baked crap beforehand anyway".
Thankfully Windows and macOS have been doing their darndest to regress. Otherwise desktop Linux wouldn't stand a chance with such harebrained management. Only after a decade of biting teeth Wayland is finally ready for most.
Wayland simplified it significantly. Screen sharing is now done through xdg, and it's standardized. Meaning, you don't need to rewrite frail screensharing code for multiple desktops. You just use xdg and then boom - it works across every distro, every window manager, every compositor, every GPU.
Screensharing on X was hacky, and each application did their own thing to capture the screen. So sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn't, sometimes it would have horrible performance, sometimes your specific GPU would break it, etc. Some apps handled it better than others as well. Wayland solves this.
Yes that does mean you need to use xdg standards instead of the old code that barely worked. Yes that does mean some apps will take forever to adopt it because they don't care. But it is actually a better system.
And there's other really cool xdg protocols, too, that enable a type of cross platform design that was never possible on X.
Comments
It didn't have to be this way, but somehow the Wayland clique did not realize - or just dug their head in the sand - that things like screenshots or screen sharing are basic table stakes. Instead, they created an academic replacement for X11 and left it upon the community to plug the most obvious gaps.
Understandably, actual users tend to get kind of pissed when you break their computer without offering any replacement except "just quit your job and don't use Zoom" or "wait 10 years for Gnome to add protocol foobar to support it, but they will force you to use this half baked crap beforehand anyway".
Thankfully Windows and macOS have been doing their darndest to regress. Otherwise desktop Linux wouldn't stand a chance with such harebrained management. Only after a decade of biting teeth Wayland is finally ready for most.
Wayland simplified it significantly. Screen sharing is now done through xdg, and it's standardized. Meaning, you don't need to rewrite frail screensharing code for multiple desktops. You just use xdg and then boom - it works across every distro, every window manager, every compositor, every GPU.
Screensharing on X was hacky, and each application did their own thing to capture the screen. So sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn't, sometimes it would have horrible performance, sometimes your specific GPU would break it, etc. Some apps handled it better than others as well. Wayland solves this.
Yes that does mean you need to use xdg standards instead of the old code that barely worked. Yes that does mean some apps will take forever to adopt it because they don't care. But it is actually a better system.
And there's other really cool xdg protocols, too, that enable a type of cross platform design that was never possible on X.