Linux-Fake-Background-Webcam VS Rectangle

I'm trying to install Linux-Fake-Background-Webcam, which in turn requires 4l2loopback. Following the 4l2loopback manual, I try the following command to install it:

> Is this really a problem with Zoom or one with Wayland and the Linux distros?

I would say this is really a problem with Zoom, mostly due to the lack of attention paid to their web client.

For me, when it comes to video conferencing, the "table stakes" is working duplex audio over bluetooth, and so far only pipewire has solved this, which means Linux only.

After that, two very important features to have are screen sharing and background blur. For screen sharing, both Chrome/Chromium and Firefox have great support for screencast over pipewire, and so do many wayland compositors such as KDE kwin. As such, on a "pure" wayland system with no X11 window [1], screen sharing is also a solved problem.

Background blur is more ... complicated. When Google Meet rolled out https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/10/background-features-in-goo..., it immediately worked with chrome/chromium, on either wayland or X11. However, to this day, I think it still doesn't work with firefox, for whatever reason. Meanwhile, Zoom Linux client only started to support background blur (without green screen) since 5.7.6 released in August 2021, while Zoom web client remains hopeless.

In my previous job, we use Google Meet, and all is well with wayland. In the current one, we use Zoom, and I have to setup https://github.com/fangfufu/Linux-Fake-Background-Webcam as a workaround.

[1] This is very much doable these days, unless you want to run Slack desktop, which is hit-and-miss when running with --ozone-platform=wayland (unlike other electron-based apps such as Signal desktop), and of course the Zoom Linux app, which is just crap, as described in the article. Solution: run Slack and Zoom as Firefox tabs.

I was going to say, Zoom's absolutely broken greenscreen support is nicely hacked in X by the community with this excellent repo: https://github.com/fangfufu/Linux-Fake-Background-Webcam

It seems pretty cool, but why does it need to be run as root? I can run Linux-Fake-Background-Webcam just fine without root!

I use https://github.com/fangfufu/Linux-Fake-Background-Webcam and it works great (realtime) for video background removal.

Tip: I use Rectangle app to set up keyboard shortcuts to resize windows (I only have three shortcuts there: left/right half of the screen and full screen).

But Raycast also has some functionality in that direction.

[1] - https://rectangleapp.com/

Two more little utilities that I cannot live without on Mac:

A tiling window manager like https://rectangleapp.com/

Muzzle, which automatically silences desktop notifs when you're screensharing https://muzzleapp.com/

I suggest using Rectangle instead of Magnet; it has the same features but is free. I don't know what other Windows features you want to have.

I’ve used this app forever. Adds in all the window snapping features.

third-party window management apps like Magnet and Rectangle

Rectangle Mac - Move and resize windows in macOS using keyboard shortcuts or snap areas, similar to Windows.

I was a Spectacle user for years, but I recently switched to using Rectangle for window management. Rectangle has a few more options than Spectacle; I’m still getting used to it but I have no strong feelings either way.

Why would you pay for magnet when you can use rectangle, which is the same but open source? https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle