OBS Studio Now Ready With Wayland Capture Support

[Jumbotron]

I've followed Georges Stravracas's work off and on for years. He's a beast ! And I second and third all the comments concerning Synaptic and Wayland. It's my daily driver for package installation and management of all things not Flatpaks or Snaps.

[cl333r]

Wayland-compatible capturing by making use of PipeWire and Flatpak Portals

For those that don't know Flatpak Portals is just a name for libraries managed/encapsulated by flatpak, e.g. Qt, gtk, etc, because "portals" sounds like a software hole into another dimension that gives you super powers, but it's just flatpak's way to call libraries.

[Vistaus]

Now if only the Synaptic package manager could get support for Wayland too, then that would be great.
Wayland doesn't let applications run as root so it needs Synaptic to do some changes, such as using pkexec.

I quite like Synaptic (though it's not my favorite package manager ever), but development is very, very slow, Recently, the one and only dev picked up a few commits to modernize some small things, but not bigger things. It's quite an archaic program that doesn't get the attention it needs, so I think it'll be a long while before Wayland will be supported.

[gQuigs]

Hey! I'm doing those "modernize some small things" bit in Synaptic. If there was an easy path to actually get proper Wayland support I think it would have been done before me. Right now I'm trying to figure what's the proper way for software-properties to exist. Synaptic has it's own built-in alternative to that as well - and that needs to change to even consider Wayland.

[Charlie68]

I haven't used Synaptic for twelve years or so, but I remember even back then there were calls to move Synaptic to use polkit instead of running
the whole UI as root.

Which is what KDE did with Muon.
This time KDE was faster.

[ernstp]

Now if only I could get ffmpeg VAAPI (amdgpu) to work well also! Get one frame every 5 seconds only. Tried 30 fps @ 720p, exactly the same. It looks in the result like it's actually encoding a lot of frames, it's just the same frame over and over mostly...

[oiaohm]

For those that don't know Flatpak Portals is just a name for libraries managed/encapsulated by flatpak, e.g. Qt, gtk, etc, because "portals" sounds like a software hole into another dimension that gives you super powers, but it's just flatpak's way to call libraries.

Flatpak Portals is another dimension thing its part libraries. Remember flatpak installed applications run inside a sandbox. Flatpak portals allows interface from inside the sandbox to the host system normally done by dbus.

Saying Flatpak portals is just libraries means you have missed the functionality there to being inside sandbox and then perform action outside sandbox. Flatpak portals open close save dialog stuff can allow saving files that the application inside the sandbox of flatpak cannot directly access with your normal libc open command or Linux kernel syscalls.

[oiaohm]

Now if only the Synaptic package manager could get support for Wayland too, then that would be great.
Wayland doesn't let applications run as root so it needs Synaptic to do some changes, such as using pkexec.

This is true and false at the same time that Wayland doesn't let applications run as root.

https://github.com/mvo5/synaptic/issues/15#issuecomment-509029135

The temporary workaround in the synaptic bug report here mentions the xhost command with the xhost command you can tell Xwayland to allow root user applications to connect to it out the box XWayland correctly rejects any attempt to connect from any user that is not the user Xwayland is running as . So while Synaptic is a X11 application it still can be made work on Wayland desktops by jumping though the right hoops.

Now once you move to a pure Wayland application it is still possible to run as application root and have your primary desktop as a different user but you are now needing item like Waypipe.

So Wayland does not totally block running applications as root just if you want todo that there is going to be extra steps and software required. Yes Waypipe for pure wayland applications and Xwayland with correct xhost command for X11 applications then you can run applications on Wayland desktop as normal user and application as root user.

Ideal world is Synaptic changes so it GUI does not need to run as root this has not been a good for a very long time. Root user under Linux has lot of a ability to-do system harm right down to totally bricking hardware so you really don't want any more software running as root than has to. Yes the GUI part of Synaptic really has no valid reason to be running as root.

[cl333r]

Saying Flatpak portals is just libraries means you have missed the functionality there to being inside sandbox and then perform action outside sandbox.

Which still sucks for me because I have a file browser I wanted to release as a flatpak only to learn this kind of applications can't be ported to flatpak without losing vital functionality.

[oiaohm]

Which still sucks for me because I have a file browser I wanted to release as a flatpak only to learn this kind of applications can't be ported to flatpak without losing vital functionality.

Its the trade off unfortunately. There is no portal made for getting the information a file browser wants to display.

Containerisation is changing things. "system extension images" coming in systemd will also make doing a useful file manager tricker. Also in time could provide another route todo a Linux Distribution Neutral runtime of course this will equal being sandboxed again so no longer seeing the real file system directly.

The file browser problem is going to get more complex over time. Sooner or latter someone will have to-do a host access portal for file browsers because direct libc/syscalls will not be seeing the true system picture any more just what the container the file manager is in is showing.