wayland fedora 36

[Akimm113]

Doesn't show image on wayland, works on xorg after service restart. Fedora 36

[barak]

The transition from X11 to Wayland is pretty far along: Wayland is the default for Redhat, Debian, and Ubuntu. It's still possible to run X11 sessions for many desktop environments (like Gnome) but X11 will start withering away pretty soon.

[tobydox]

I'm aware of that. Unfortunately Wayland has no mechanism for capturing the screen without explicit consent of the user (through the Desktop Portal interface). While it's fully understandable from a security point of view, it effectively prevents monitoring applications such as Veyon to work properly in that case since a student explicitly has to grant the access every time. Teachers would always have to rely on the cooperation on the students. So unless there's another technical approach/interface we have to tell Veyon users to continue using X11 :-(

[barak]

This seems like something that the Wayland people might want to know about? It seems straightforward in principle to allow some sort of extra authentication mechanism for root processes or something like that. Or maybe the desktop portal interface can be hotwired to automatically and silently consent when appropriate.

[tobydox]

Yes, a technical solution granting special apps immediate and permanent access to user sessions would be optimal. Any support in getting such an extension done is welcome.

I already started both a Pipewire as well as WayVNC-based implementation 2 years ago (https://github.com/veyon/veyon/tree/pipewire) but did not continue the work on it due to the mentioned challenges.

[Conan-Kudo]

This is something that should be requested in the xdg-desktop-portal repo: https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal

That way, a solution can be designed that is desktop agnostic that can be deployed for managed machines like ones deployed by schools.

[Conan-Kudo]

I've created an issue about this, please add (useful!) commentary to provide context for the developers there: flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal#1105

[idoric]

@tobydox On the issue created by @Conan-Kudo (see previous comment), there is a question which deserves your clarification since Veyon is directly concerned. The question is: "can you expand exactly what scenarios Veyon needs pre-authorization?"

[mercifulboss]

I'm aware of that. Unfortunately Wayland has no mechanism for capturing the screen without explicit consent of the user (through the Desktop Portal interface). While it's fully understandable from a security point of view, it effectively prevents monitoring applications such as Veyon to work properly in that case since a student explicitly has to grant the access every time. Teachers would always have to rely on the cooperation on the students. So unless there's another technical approach/interface we have to tell Veyon users to continue using X11 :-(

What about using xwaylandvideobridge? It allows screensharing on basically every app with no problems. This bypasses all the problems you mentioned and works on every browser, zoom, teams, discord, etc.

https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/xwaylandvideobridge/

Wasn't able to figure out how to screen record via the software (honestly i'd just use obs for that) but I was able to have the system work on Wayland:

The only problem was that when you initially start monitoring the screen is laggy - this is fixed by switching windows on the monitored machine.

[idoric]

What the Epoptes project plans to do on this subject can also serve as a source of inspiration: epoptes/epoptes#184.