No desktops found on Screen Capture (Xorg, Flatpak)

[Domojestic]

I've just (like, 5 minutes ago) installed the OBS Studio Flatpak on my Kubuntu 22.04.3 LTS laptop, hoping to do some video recording stuff for fun. I was able to set up my microphone fine, but I don't have any desktop sources when I try to add a screen capture. I tried looking online, but all the threads I found seem to relate to Wayland. Here are some screenshots:

What might be causing this? I was really hoping to send a recording of something I was working on to a friend.

 

[Domojestic]

I think I fixed it! Selecting the XSHM option works. In that case, though, why didn't PipeWire? Is one better than the other? I.e., should I continue trying to get PipeWire to work?

 

[AaronD]

PipeWire itself is still experimental. It's being used in a few bleeding-edge distros now, with mixed success, but not everything even has it yet. It's entirely possible that you don't, and so there's nothing for OBS to get from that source.

And as I just said in a different thread about Flatpak:

The prepackaged versions have problems, mostly because of the security model that those package systems are designed for in the first place. Snap has the same problem.

They're supposed to be "sandboxes", where nothing gets in or out without explicit permission, and that really messes with the way that OBS works.

Remove the flatpak, install the official PPA, and install OBS from there:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:obsproject/obs-studio
sudo apt update
sudo apt install obs-studio

Then things should work as intended.

 

[AaronD]

Wayland is also new, and has its own set of bugs and missing features compared to the older systems. I'd love it if someone would explain why we needed yet another one of those!

---

PipeWire has been long overdue, possibly because it's supposed to solve a hard problem of combining multiple completely different media managers with completely different philosophies into one thing, so that *all* apps can talk to each other easily, regardless of which manager they're designed for exclusively.

The present "state of the art" for well-established, risk-averse systems is to run all of those different managers simultaneously and create a series of bridges between them as-needed, which is of course a mess to set up and must be done manually, but it does work once it is. So I'm very much looking forward to when PW becomes reliable enough to be preinstalled exclusively on those rock-solid-stable distros and "just work".