THthrowdbaaway·Jan 21, 2022
> 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 immediate
Read the rest
ly 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.