I had the same problem with screen share not working in Firefox. It simply gave an empty list of things to pick from to share.

After, idk, half a year or so, I gave it a fifth(?) try, it still didn't work, and I googled the problem once more. Lo' and behold: you have to install xdg-desktop-portal to get screen share functionality. I installed it, and it worked.

Now there's 2 problems with this:

1. the UX is F'ing punching out the bottom of the barrel. There is no hint, no error message, no breadcrumb to tell you what's going on. You just get an empty list of sharing choices and are left completely befuddled. Cool.

2. xdg-desktop-portal, first hit when you look it up, starts its description with "A portal frontend service for Flatpak and possibly other desktop containment frameworks." What the F does that have to do with screen sharing? (Apparent answer: …sandboxing/access control?) If you dig more, you do get told that it does screen sharing, but with a first hit noodling on about "Flatpak" … "desktop containment" why would you even be inclined to dig deeper?

The irony of an UI project being this oblivious about dealing with users is… well.

I don’t remember everything working fine in 2003. I remember it being a cluster, especially with audio.

Hmmm 2003 was pretty good for me. (or was it 2002?) I was one of the first people who did a wget on the Fedora 1.0 iso download link on freenode/#fedora

xmms worked fine after installing.

Hippie nonsense like an npm install not installing any keylogger with arbitrary internet access without even trying? Or multiple screens with different resolutions?

I've had multiple screens with different resolutions in xorg since 2008 (one laptop, one monitor setup). How is npm even related? Are you just generating responses?

What kind of security does your typical linux desktop has? I help you, basically none.

Something as “benign” as an npm install could do basically anything on your computer, besides installing a video card driver (as per the old xkcd, but nothing improved since). At least wayland took a new approach that is not as naive as the previous millenium’s stance on security.

I'm really not understanding how npm security is related to wayland security. Do you mean sending everything through dbus in plain text format? Yes, wayland wet the bed on that one.

If npm is the only thing you know and want to talk about, and you have no idea what the security weaknesses introduced by wayland or xorg are, maybe do it in another thread?

Npm is a random executable that happens to be common. It can run arbitrary code and linux userspace is basically beyond useless in securing anything meaningful about itself. That Documents/FamilyPhotos album? Completely read-writable, I can just send the whole content to any IP address. One might say that you can run it in firejail or so, but noone does it.

But here comes the graphics-related problem: even with firejail, any X program has basically unrestricted access to your whole screen and every key event without any form of security. This is basically unsolvable without nesting x sessions, or.. throwing away the whole of X and starting afresh with better primitives, a la wayland.

Yes that's all well and good, but What "security primitives" in wayland are you even typing about? The main author basically admits in every forum and discussion that there is nothing to do if your system is compromised.

> Discord screen share did not work at all. I guess the official app doesn’t support wayland.

This will probably get fixed somewhat soon. We have a branch with some work to improve screenshare on Linux, including xdg-desktop-portal support (via the implementation in webrtc), but it needs some more work before it's ready to merge and deploy. Unfortunately, the Wayland experience will still be worse than X11 when this lands because this branch also brings audio share to X11. We wanted to do the same for Wayland, but xdg-desktop-portal has no audio support and doesn't provide enough information to find the right audio source via pulse/pipewire manually.

I've had the same issues, the problem extends to Zoom too.