How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition

• xdg-desktop-portal-wlr

  68 555 6.8 C

  xdg-desktop-portal backend for wlroots

  Even the _current_ LTS from Ubuntu does not ship Pipewire 0.3, which is _required_ to use the portal API for screencasting (no dma-buf import in pipewire 0.2), unless you want for it to be slower than using X11 and Xshm. So this API doesn't even work in the current fastest-LTS-cycle distro.

  > And it's not MIGHT work on anything other than Gnome, it DOES.

  well, I say that because even thought single-window screencasting now works in Gnome, when I try to do it on _anything_ else I get a black screen.

  And turns out because it is not yet implemented https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr/blob/c34d...

  This stuff is just way too recent.

• winevdm

  116 2,419 7.9 C

  16-bit Windows (Windows 1.x, 2.x, 3.0, 3.1, etc.) on 64-bit Windows

  > Your best bet at running 16 bit Windows applications on a modern OS is running them via Wine.

  Fun fact, you can use a WineVDM-based 16bit emulator on Windows[0] that translates 16bit calls to 32/64bit calls and install it system-wide thus allowing the use of 16bit programs in 64bit Windows. Here are two examples from screenshots i have around: Microlathe[1], a small utility to build 3D models by rotating a line around an axis (i also made my own clone[3] of it) and [2]a free Smalltalk environment (Smalltalk Express - which i actually consider one of the simplest Smalltalk environments since it only contains a small subset of what you'd find in a modern one thus making it easier to grok).

  [0] https://github.com/otya128/winevdm

  [1] https://i.imgur.com/e26mqWP.png

  [2] https://i.imgur.com/r5aQNyJ.png

  [3] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/lila/

• InfluxDB

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• Linux-Fake-Background-Webcam

  16 1,563 5.7 Python

  Faking your webcam background under GNU/Linux, now supports background blurring, animated background, colour map effect, hologram effect and on-demand processing.

  > 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.

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