I really love to see how well supported Wayland nowadays is. We're probably still missing a couple of things, but so far my experience has been fantastic.
#1 problem for me is a combination of issues:
- xwayland has no DPI scaling support (or rather, naive blurry pixel upscaling)
- jebrains ides have no native Wayland support
Result is a blurry mess of an ide. Once that is resolved, I'll be wholeheartedly aboard the Wayland train.
I'm not sure about this statement to be honest, but maybe I never cared that much since xwayland works already good on my machines: have you tried with a custom JDK?
According to their bugtracker[1], there does still seem to be issues, but I hadn't looked in a while, and I'm glad to now see they plan to have it solved by end of the year \o/
The year was 2021: Windows was starting again to support non-x86 hardware architectures, and Microsoft was shipping the best to Linux desktop experience. Mac OS shipped with the the fastest mobile processor in the world. Android basically owned the phone market.... Linux desktop was just getting somewhat working basic screenshot support.
To be fair it was only Flameshot that was kind of missing Wayland support. There were / are other alternatives specifically made for Wayland: saying that the whole ecosystem was lagging behind becaude of this specific app is a bit of a stretch.
Yet, it doesn't have a proper highlighter pen. It draws a straight line and adds up. If you go over the same spot twice or more text might become unreadable and it will just look wrong. I have been unable to find a Linux screenshot tool that does it right. I use Flameshot on Linux too, but it's the least bad one in my book.
I am not able to use it on sway with default swaybar. The notification simply says "Unable to capture screen" when I click on the tray icon. From CLI also I tried a few commands but nothing happens. No errors as well. Can you please help me?
seems like xdg-desktop-portal-wlr depends on having grim installed. At least it started working for me when I installed grim
edit: maybe not, is still only works sometimes
In i3 (and therefor sway) you can use bindsym. I don't know it off the top of my head, but it should be easy enough to find.
The "-d" option with flameshot is used to have delays.
nice to have some alternatives to grim[1] on Sway. Guess most people won't care, however I would not want my screenshot tool to be able to access the network.
Yes, and the ability to annotate and block out parts of the image before saving. Simple tools that for some reason other screenshot tools have been mind-bogglingly oblivious to provide.
(It has a blur tool too, but I don't recommend blurring sensitive data as if the area under the blur kernel is 1, the sum of the pixel values will be the same before and after the blur, and if an attacker recognizes which font and size it is from other parts of the screen, they use could dictionary attack for the text with the sum of the pixels as the hash to be cracked.)
Why do people still use imgur after all the antipatterns they've pushed? When I tap the direct image links in this thread I get greeted with an extremely slow infinite scrolling page, social media features galore, and intrusive requests to install the app.
the whole wayland ecosystem is slowling taking shape month after month. and given the radical change that wayland is, most thing have to be re-implemented using radically different tooling, libraries and approaches, which is very similar to re-inventing.
Major distros have been shipping wayland as the default backend for almost five years! I mean, yes, it's a lot of work. But it was wildly premature, and the community support for this stuff has been nothing short of a disaster of apathy and ignorance.
Which is to say: what you say is true, but there's no excuse for breaking screenshots (!) for half a decade in the name of "progress".
(And I say that as someone who genuinely thinks Wayland itself is great software. But the desktop projects and distros have a job to do too, and they didn't.)
Really only Fedora has shipped Wayland by default for five years, and they do this with a lot of other tech as well (GNOME 3 and Cgroups v2 to name some more). If there is no user demand, nobody wants to do the work of supporting new technology, which is why Fedora releases things before they are ready. Anyone using Fedora should know this.
Well, yeah, but... FIVE YEARS. I mean, sure, Fedora ships bleeding edge stuff. But can you imagine a world where, I dunno, LTO or ASLR or C++ ABI changes or whatever took FIVE YEARS to stabilize and were still missing core features that the previous technology offered?
I mean, no one was surprised in 2016 when Wayland landed that there would be bumps in the road. It's 2021 now!
> Which is to say: what you say is true, but there's no excuse for breaking screenshots (!) for half a decade in the name of "progress".
Breaking, or wholly removing, loved and important features because the developers believe they know better is sort of the modus operandi of the Gnome team; and don't you dare file a bug report. They don't accept criticism graciously.
See also: file picker icons, desktop icons, task tray, et cetera.
This is sadly spreading... you have a thing, that is old, well tested, and works (and had worked for years).... but someone wants to reimplement this same thing in Rust, or whatever language of the day, because it's "safer" than (eg.) C... so you get something that has 40% of the features of the old software, 20% of the features that were done with another standard software, and one or two really important features missing.... but developer and distro-makers don't care, because it's "modern" and written in Rust (or whatever).
I don't wanna poop on their parade, but haven't Wayland screenshotters been around for a while? https://github.com/emersion/grim
That one has at least been around for long enough, and has worked perfectly under Sway for long enough, that I had to look up its name because I had it bound to a hotkey and had forgotten what it was called.
grim can write the image to stdout. GUI like [1] can read images from stdin. You can make a script that pipes one to the other and bind that in your compositor.
Hmm, funny I should see this here after TeMPOraL mentioned it to me a few days ago. It looks much better than Shutter, which I use now. I'll try to write an IMGZ plugin for it, one-shot image upload and copying the URL to the clipboard would be fantastic.
Literally the first sentence of the linked page is "Improved MacOS support. MacOS is now officially supported and we will resolve any reported issues on this platform."
However, I think build-in screenshot tools (that even can take videos) in Macos are already quite powerful. What do you miss?
When it says "supports Wayland" does it actually mean that Wayland upped the game to support screenshots at the protocol level, or is this all the major compositors have settled on a de-facto screenshot standard to implement in parallel to Wayland?
Because I don't think, technically, it is possible for a screenshot tool to "support Wayland".
According to the website, it has "experimental" support for GNOME and Plasma (KDE) on Wayland, with Sway added as of the latest version (0.9). As far as I'm aware those three account for most Wayland desktops in the wild, but maybe I'm missing something.
There's no real standard, but something that may develop into a de-facto standard. The 3 possible ways I am aware of are:
- org.gnome.Shell.Screenshot, a dbus API primarily/only used by GNOME
- wlr-screencopy, a Wayland protocol extension primarily implemented by wlroots, which Sway, Wayfire and many other compositors use
- xdg-desktop-portal, which is promoted by the freedesktop group and an abstraction of both APIs using special portals for each desktop, Flatpak compatible and delivering screen content via Pipewire (supported by Firefox and Chromium)
Flameshot now supports the former 2, I have the most long term hope for the latter one.
By fascinating you mean depressing, right? If Wayland has taken this long to get a basic feature like screenshots what other features does it not support?
There's a battle over basically everything beyond drawing basic windows in the Wayland sphere, with the parties' attitudes about as follows:
- Wayland team: "Out of scope, lol" (security, keeping it as generic as possible)
- Gnome: "Works for us" (dbus APIs specific to Gnome")
- wlroots: Developing extensions to the Wayland protocol and attempting to get them into Wayland proper and adopted by others
- KDE: Mostly going the KDE way where it makes sense, but open to wlr persuasion (they will implement layer-shell, but keep their own ways for some other things)
- Freedesktop group (I'm the least familiar with this one): Promoting some stuff meant for Flatpak, but not really showing much initiative beyond that
This fragmentation is one of the reasons Wayland adoption is slow. Users expect things to work across desktops as they used to on X and developers aren't always clear about compatibility either. Many people seem to think that Wayland is just another display server (it's not, it's a protocol!) with all of the old functionality and are frustrated when they find out it is not.
The fragmentation will probably exist for quite a while. Pipewire will probably take over the screen sharing space and KDE and wlroots will share more protocols (Gnome gonna Gnome, of course), but there are just many things that are compositor family- or even compositor specific, like an xkill-equivalent, which I still miss dearly.
If you're looking for a screenshot tool for macOS, I cannot recommend CleanShot X highly enough. It in the league of its own, with scroll capture, gifs, even changing your desktop in the screenshot, but not "in reality". I'm really impressed.
At our small company we trialed Jumpshare, CloudApp and a bunch of other stuff for both video and screenshots.
Cleanshot was by far the best, and costs the least. Unlike most tools which are SaaSified and require a monthly subscription, CleanShot still offers a one-off license. It's a steal.
The only one at our company not using Cleanshot is a developer on Linux. I think he's using Flameshot.
> Cleanshot was by far the best, and costs the least. Unlike most tools which are SaaSified and require a monthly subscription, CleanShot still offers a one-off license. It's a steal.
I just want to remark upon how strange it is Mac users are just so nonchalantly paying for bits and bobs because their OS doesn't do things they need it to do.
I spent some time getting my Linux setup _just so_ and feel like I gave macOS a good go when I tried it for 11 months as a daily driver, but I just couldn't take it.
Find a little niggling problem that bothers you just a little bit? Here's a program that fixes it, but it's $5.
I've been a linux user for >10 years and switched to Mac ~4 years ago. I use, love, create, maintain and contribute to open source.
Honestly, the only thing I miss from Linux is i3 (window manager). For the rest, much happier with what Mac offers. I use spectacle on MacOS, which isn't nearly as good as i3wm. It's open-source. I use a bunch of other free or open source tools for Mac. Karabiner, f.lux and lots of other tools.
CleanShot is probably one of the few paid tools I have on my Mac. My company pays for it, and it's something like $20 one-off. Well worth it. I would have paid triple that if it worked on Linux.
I think it's a false dichotomy that Linux == free == good and Mac == paid == bad.
Also, my time is worth more to me and to my company. I feel more productive and that I waste less time fiddling on my Mac than my colleague on Linux. Perhaps it's an age thing, but I now value my time more, and prefer to fiddle only with certain things and not others.
There’s a newer fork of Spectacle out there called “Rectangle” that is actively maintained. You can find it on GitHub. Same shortcut keys by default and more options for other stuff.
Not working completely as intended here (sway, nixos): it can take a single screenshot, and then later executions fail with those messages: http://0x0.st/-Z6n.txt
Using it daily, Flameshot is great! Two wishes
I would love to be able to add arrows to an existing, previously arrowed+labeled screenshot, rather then having to redo it again, so the style matches.
Also, adding captured screenshots to the list of recent files (in his example Nautilus) would be awesome.
I think flameshot is more for people who prefer design over functionality. Although the feature set is not too bad.
Does shutter have annotation features?
Is there a way to install Shutter on modern Debian? It only is available for old stable and oldoldstable. I would love to try it, but prefer function over non-function.
Recently gave up on Wayland (for the moment) due to the inability to screen share most applications on Google Meet. I realise this isn't really Wayland's fault, but that doesn't really solve my problem.
I can share some specific windows, but not the whole desktop, which ends up involving a very tedious unshare and reshare to swap back and forth between windows instead.
Agreed, this is where I'm at as well. In general, I actually found sway to be wonderful, but it's not worth the hassle of switching over anytime I have a meeting where I could possibly need to screen share.
I had screen resolution issues with xorg at one point which Wayland resolved, but they no longer appear to be an issue and the lack of screen sharing has recently became an issue (change of responsibilities has led to more meetings requiring desktop screen sharing), so after a couple of years on Wayland I've recently jumped back to xorg.
129 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadI assume that this full wlroots-based compositor support (so Wayfire as well), which is great!
I really love to see how well supported Wayland nowadays is. We're probably still missing a couple of things, but so far my experience has been fantastic.
Result is a blurry mess of an ide. Once that is resolved, I'll be wholeheartedly aboard the Wayland train.
I'm not sure about this statement to be honest, but maybe I never cared that much since xwayland works already good on my machines: have you tried with a custom JDK?
I had some issues with sway and Jetbrains back in November, but I fixed those by running them on the latest JDK: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/3007#issuecomment-7245...
Granted that yes, probably it's not Wayland native, but using HiDPI in my case didn't seem to be a problem to be honest
1: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-1315
But the meme is good, I'll give you that
If you don't want sort of broken stuff don't use a distro that changes major versions every 6 months.
I set my print screen key to it, and works every time, instead of the built-in screenshot tool where the popups/menus will have disappeared.
https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/issues
https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/issues/1408
I'd like to emulate spectacle (kde screenshot tool) that allows a 2 seconds delay between rectangular area or application to be screenshoted.
command_screenshot_interactive = grim -g "$(slurp)" - | tee $(xdg-user-dir DOCUMENTS)/screencap/$(date +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ).png | wl-copy
For wlroots-based compositors like sway here's the most lightweight solution: https://hg.sr.ht/~scoopta/wlrobs
For mutter (GNOME): https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal + pipewire
My favorite way to record on wlroots compositors is wf-recorder, which seems to be lighter on resources than the others.
There's also a fork of SimpleScreenRecorder (with similar issues, unfortunately).
Here's an overview of screencasting tools for wlroots based compositors like Sway and Wayfire: https://github.com/solarkraft/awesome-wlroots#screencasting
[1] https://github.com/emersion/grim
Thank you!
(It has a blur tool too, but I don't recommend blurring sensitive data as if the area under the blur kernel is 1, the sum of the pixel values will be the same before and after the blur, and if an attacker recognizes which font and size it is from other parts of the screen, they use could dictionary attack for the text with the sum of the pixels as the hash to be cracked.)
https://i.imgur.com/ZtR60qw.png
I love nesting screenshots into screenshots by simply hitting the PRTSC button muliple times
https://i.imgur.com/9NKvWko.png
https://i.imgur.com/n8Mwh1Z.png
EDIT:
___
And you should also install "hoverzoom" under brave broser with multiple blockers:
https://i.imgur.com/OcOJhyE.jpg
I like postimages.org.
:|
the whole wayland ecosystem is slowling taking shape month after month. and given the radical change that wayland is, most thing have to be re-implemented using radically different tooling, libraries and approaches, which is very similar to re-inventing.
Which is to say: what you say is true, but there's no excuse for breaking screenshots (!) for half a decade in the name of "progress".
(And I say that as someone who genuinely thinks Wayland itself is great software. But the desktop projects and distros have a job to do too, and they didn't.)
I mean, no one was surprised in 2016 when Wayland landed that there would be bumps in the road. It's 2021 now!
Breaking, or wholly removing, loved and important features because the developers believe they know better is sort of the modus operandi of the Gnome team; and don't you dare file a bug report. They don't accept criticism graciously.
See also: file picker icons, desktop icons, task tray, et cetera.
I generally parse this as half-baked, not battle-tested, and difficult to use.
That one has at least been around for long enough, and has worked perfectly under Sway for long enough, that I had to look up its name because I had it bound to a hotkey and had forgotten what it was called.
[1]: https://github.com/jtheoof/swappy
- macOS has even better tools built in
- If that's not enough, try CleanShot
However, I think build-in screenshot tools (that even can take videos) in Macos are already quite powerful. What do you miss?
- immediate jump into editor after taking screenshot, with...
- text annotations
- arrow annotations
- box/circle annotations
- BLUR
- upload to imgur
- copy to clipboard
Unless this does something that I'm not seeing, macOS has this tool builtin
Because I don't think, technically, it is possible for a screenshot tool to "support Wayland".
- org.gnome.Shell.Screenshot, a dbus API primarily/only used by GNOME
- wlr-screencopy, a Wayland protocol extension primarily implemented by wlroots, which Sway, Wayfire and many other compositors use
- xdg-desktop-portal, which is promoted by the freedesktop group and an abstraction of both APIs using special portals for each desktop, Flatpak compatible and delivering screen content via Pipewire (supported by Firefox and Chromium)
Flameshot now supports the former 2, I have the most long term hope for the latter one.
It is fascinating watching the near decade-long journey as Wayland tackles screenshots.
Wayland doesn't actually support screenshots, it's all extensions.
TBH I use GreenShot exclusively as it is seamless and does every thing I Need [0]
[0] https://i.imgur.com/x0oMzb6.png
And I can do things like this
[1] https://i.imgur.com/ZtR60qw.png
Nested fucking screenshots.
All I have to do is hit prtscrn each iteration I want to capture
- Wayland team: "Out of scope, lol" (security, keeping it as generic as possible)
- Gnome: "Works for us" (dbus APIs specific to Gnome")
- wlroots: Developing extensions to the Wayland protocol and attempting to get them into Wayland proper and adopted by others
- KDE: Mostly going the KDE way where it makes sense, but open to wlr persuasion (they will implement layer-shell, but keep their own ways for some other things)
- Freedesktop group (I'm the least familiar with this one): Promoting some stuff meant for Flatpak, but not really showing much initiative beyond that
This fragmentation is one of the reasons Wayland adoption is slow. Users expect things to work across desktops as they used to on X and developers aren't always clear about compatibility either. Many people seem to think that Wayland is just another display server (it's not, it's a protocol!) with all of the old functionality and are frustrated when they find out it is not.
The fragmentation will probably exist for quite a while. Pipewire will probably take over the screen sharing space and KDE and wlroots will share more protocols (Gnome gonna Gnome, of course), but there are just many things that are compositor family- or even compositor specific, like an xkill-equivalent, which I still miss dearly.
At our small company we trialed Jumpshare, CloudApp and a bunch of other stuff for both video and screenshots.
Cleanshot was by far the best, and costs the least. Unlike most tools which are SaaSified and require a monthly subscription, CleanShot still offers a one-off license. It's a steal.
The only one at our company not using Cleanshot is a developer on Linux. I think he's using Flameshot.
I just want to remark upon how strange it is Mac users are just so nonchalantly paying for bits and bobs because their OS doesn't do things they need it to do.
I spent some time getting my Linux setup _just so_ and feel like I gave macOS a good go when I tried it for 11 months as a daily driver, but I just couldn't take it.
Find a little niggling problem that bothers you just a little bit? Here's a program that fixes it, but it's $5.
Repeat ad nauseam.
Honestly, the only thing I miss from Linux is i3 (window manager). For the rest, much happier with what Mac offers. I use spectacle on MacOS, which isn't nearly as good as i3wm. It's open-source. I use a bunch of other free or open source tools for Mac. Karabiner, f.lux and lots of other tools.
CleanShot is probably one of the few paid tools I have on my Mac. My company pays for it, and it's something like $20 one-off. Well worth it. I would have paid triple that if it worked on Linux.
I think it's a false dichotomy that Linux == free == good and Mac == paid == bad.
Also, my time is worth more to me and to my company. I feel more productive and that I waste less time fiddling on my Mac than my colleague on Linux. Perhaps it's an age thing, but I now value my time more, and prefer to fiddle only with certain things and not others.
YMMV. All the power to you for using Linux!
I never use it though, because I take screenshot with CleanShot and then share directly in Slack / etc.
I like the direct upload to imgur though.
I tried flameshot once and don't really get how one would find it more useful than Shutter.