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After upgrading to Ubuntu 17.10 I noticed some of my screencasting applications are not working, for example screencasting tools like SimpleScreenRecorder and vokoscreen. (link)

Also I noticed features like screenshot from GIMP is not working properly, producing blank screenshots (link). Shutter too is producing glitchy screenshots (link).

Screen-sharing option on Skype is also not working (link).

The issue occurs sometimes on later Ubuntu releases too.

Why is this happening and how do I fix this?

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4 Answers 4

Reset to default
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Ubuntu 17.10 by default lets users log in to a GNOME environment on a Wayland session. You may check whether you're logged into a Wayland session instead of an Xorg (X11) session by running the following command in Terminal:

echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE

Applications which are not compatible with Wayland yet run under a XWayland compatibility layer. But advanced applications, which depend on and/or control X11 server "too much" (screen-capturing/recording etc.), might fail to run in a Wayland session.

As a workaround you may switch back to an Xorg session.

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    What does one loose by running an Xorg session and not a Wayland session?
    – Masroor
    Oct 20, 2017 at 17:18
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    @Masroor This is a very good read. tl;dr: X is a legacy technology with many flaws and holes, but then again Wayland is not that much supported.
    – pomsky
    Oct 20, 2017 at 17:24
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    Interesting results :-)
    – sudodus
    Oct 20, 2017 at 18:27
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    @pomsky No, the screenshot feature does not work once I switch back to Wayland.
    – Masroor
    Oct 21, 2017 at 1:34
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    @Masroor If you have a hidpi display, then Wayland is a much better choice. In general Wayland handles hidpi displays in a much more smooth way, and only Wayland supports the scenario that one of your monitors is hidpi and the other one is not. On Xorg scaled/hidpi is all in or all out.
    – Attila Fulop
    Oct 31, 2017 at 8:45
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Try Green Recorder. It supports Wayland & Xorg and it will work with Ubuntu 17.10. For installation instructions please check this link

Open terminal and run all the below commands one by one

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:fossproject/ppa
sudo apt update
sudo apt install green-recorder
green-recorder
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    This doesn't answer the question
    – Daniel Pérez
    Jan 14, 2018 at 2:34
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    I disagree, workarounds are also welcome.
    – pomsky
    May 6, 2020 at 7:51
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If you're trying to playback a video recorded using 'Kazam' and encoded using H.264, I'd recommend trying out different video playback applications. I noticed that some applications (specifically in my case, VLC) played back the audio fine but produced a black screen for the video. The default totem player seemed to playback the video fine, however.

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I am using this workaround in Wayland. (Ubuntu 18.04)

sleep 3s; gnome-screenshot -a -f /tmp/scr.png && \
xclip -selection clipboard -t image/png -i /tmp/scr.png
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