Best way to voice call and screenshare with audio on Linux?
One thing I really enjoy is being able to share my screen with family and friends to watch movies together or share gameplay. On Windows, you can do this trivially with Discord. On Mac, you can do this on Discord if you install some software they recommend. On Linux, I believe it's impossible with Discord unless you use a third party front end, which I'd rather not do. Zoom has screenshare with sound, but I don't know what the Linux support is like, and it's capped at 40 minutes unless you pay.
Are there other messaging services that have voice call and audio screenshare support on Linux, no unofficial front end necessary, that's also available on Windows and Mac? It's ok if it requires some setup. Ideally it would be a group chat as opposed to streamed publicly on a site like Twitch.
I've done this with Discord on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed... you need to make sure you have all the codecs installed and may need to use X11 (it's been awhile since I've done this).
Zoom works OK with X11, but is a disaster with Wayland.
Incidentally if anyone has any suggestions for 1-on-1 cross-platform voice chats which are server-free, I'm all ears.
Jitsi meeting will do that plus it's open source! You can host your own jitsi server if you desire. I run a Matrix chat for my family so that no one is scraping our data and we can do video calls etc etc.
May I ask why you are opposed to an open source client for discord, e.g. Vesktop?
Could be that I'm uninformed or misinformed, but
And also, I'm just interested to see what other options are out there besides Discord that officially support this functionality.
Technically, yes. But they don’t enforce it for things like Vesktop. Discord only takes action against server scripting, like botting a regular user account instead of using the dev api.
As far as login safety, Vesktop’s login is just a webview that renders discord’s login page. I scan the QR code with the app on my phone and it logs in fine. You can go check the github repo to see it’s not doing anything sketchy. Even build it from source to be certain.
I’ve been using Vesktop for about 6 months with no issues. The reason I started using was actually for the wayland screenshare support. I don’t make use of anything else it has to offer over the vanilla client and it feels like I’m using regular old discord.
I was literally screen sharing on Discord yesterday in a voice call. Worked without issue for me. Running Arch+Plasma. I flip between Wayland and X11 and don't remember what I was in at the time.
Discord screen share doesn't work for me on Wayland, so I switched to vencord which is an alternate discord client https://github.com/Vencord/Vesktop
Zoom works on Linux just fine. I use it on Wayland and can do video calls and share my screen.