Hubstaff has screenshot capture support for Wayland (Linux) for client apps running 1.6.10 or higher and GNOME 41 and below. If you’re running an older version of the app, we highly recommend you update to the latest version.
What is Wayland?
Wayland is a communication protocol that specifies the communication between a display server and its clients, as well as a C library implementation of that protocol.[8] A display server using the Wayland protocol is called a Wayland compositor, because it additionally performs the task of a compositing window manager. – from Wikipedia
One of the features of Wayland is its security design, which helps to guard the user against malicious apps. Apps can no longer see everything on the screen and spy on you. But that also means you cannot run a common application (like shutter or gtk-recordmydesktop) and use it to make a screenshot or a screencast of your desktop – it will see only its own window, but nothing else (or it might crash right away). System (trusted) apps need to be used to perform these actions.
Furthermore, there isn’t a standard API for getting screenshots from Wayland. It’s dependent on what compositor (window manager/shell) the user is running, and if they implemented a proprietary API to do so. – Reference: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_debug_Wayland_problems#Screen_capture_is_not_available_with_usual_apps
Troubleshooting Wayland screen capture issues
- Hubstaff supports GNOME versions 41 and below. If you’re using GNOME version 42 or higher, you will want to consider downgrading in order for screen capture to work.
- Switching back to Xorg instead of Wayland. You can switch to Xorg from Wayland easily: Here’s a link that will show you how to do it: https://itsfoss.com/switch-xorg-wayland/
To find out what display manager you are currently using:
Step 1
Open the Terminal app from your Linux machine.
Step 2
Type in the below command:
echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE$
Step 3
If the result is X11, the app should be able to record screenshots. If it says Wayland, please follow the steps here in case you wish to downgrade to Xorg.
