Linux-Fake-Background-Webcam VS spreed

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.

> Tell me another platform that is free, has realtime chat, voice and video, has stable service, allows sharing images and other media, with good ownership management... and is open source.

Mattermost: https://mattermost.com/

Rocket.Chat: https://www.rocket.chat/

Nextcloud Talk: https://nextcloud.com/talk/

Self hosting and some assembly required. I've run all of them on cheap VPSes to explore a Slack/Discord replacement, neither was mindblowing but all of them seemed okay (Nextcloud's offering was rather barebones, though).

Audio and video support varies because getting those right is challenging, at best you'd just integrate with something like Jitsi, that one's actually pretty good for meetings and such: https://jitsi.org/ and has a cloud version too: https://meet.jit.si/ (yet people still go for Zoom and it's odd UI/UX choices)

I actually rather liked forums back in the day, but I guess nobody will be setting up that many phpBB instances in the current year, though projects like Discourse also seem promising: https://www.discourse.org/

I don't think many people at all will be leaving Discord, due to how entrenched the platform is (network effect): if you want people to help you with what you're working on, you go where they are, not vice versa.

To add to this, it's reasonably easy to run, and has many different plugins, from a calendar and contacts list, to an online document editor (like Google Docs, except it can be pretty slow and/or resource intensive: https://nextcloud.com/office/), to a simple clone of Slack (https://nextcloud.com/talk/), a mail client (https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/mail) and other things.

That said, I've had updates (across major versions) break things on multiple occasions, one out of two servers running the exact same version has random crashes and in addition to that the file locking by default (if enabled, but not using Redis: https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/config...) has broken and prevents me from deleting a file that just sits there and takes up a few GB of space. Oh and their Android app fails to upload files if I use the share option, instead of the file picker from within the app.

On the other hand, sure beats storing data on third party clouds and is free, so I'll still keep using it.

> The calendar app is very functional and allows booking of appointments based on availability similar to Calendly. This is one of many apps within its large and expanding suite.

Another noteworthy one is Talk: https://nextcloud.com/talk/

It's not quite as good as something like a self-hosted instance of Mattermost or even Rocket.Chat, but honestly if you already have Nextcloud, then it's pretty cool to be able to get something decent like that up and running quickly.

Ofc that's making Nextcloud a single point of failure in some ways and occasionally things can go sideways with these plugin based platforms (historically applies more to installs of Jenkins, but also have had some performance issues with Nextcloud that had lots of apps, too).

I still rather like Nextcloud because of being able to just run it on my servers and replace a bunch of other third party cloud platforms and still somehow manage to have good enough uptime and security.

Internal chat/communication

Nextcloud Talk (version 15.0.3): Have private video calls and chat using your own server.

Nextcloud Talk

Nextcloud has a chat app https://nextcloud.com/talk/

Nextcloud with the Talk extension can do exactly what you are looking for! https://nextcloud.com/talk/