I was speaking at a conference recently and was asked to chair the session at the last minute. It was hybrid, so all the speakers needed to share their slides on Zoom. I have been daily driving Linux for 14 years, and this has almost never been a problem (there was a moment with i3 but it seems better). But I hadn't bothered to test this since installing (and generally loving!) PopOS COSMIC.
The problem, at root, is Wayland. Zoom has some kind of workaround it seems, but it's not working yet in COSMIC.
The result was sad: speakers having to speak with their slides being run by one of the remote speakers, and anyone who recognized the computer running Zoom as Linux surely strengthened their conviction never to try that.
> anyone who recognized the computer running Zoom as Linux surely strengthened their conviction never to try that.
It always boggles me how supporters of Wayland (or other things that are new and better and worth deprecating the old one for) miss this. It only takes one experience like this to make the average person view Wayland (or Linux as a whole) as a total failure.
Wayland isn't a piece of software. It's a protocol. Compositors that implement it are Gnome's Mutter, KWin, wlroots, hyprland's compositor, and others. COSMIC implements their own compositor too and that's probably where the problem lies...
I use Gnome, and Wayland sessions have been flawless for years. Screen sharing works, everything works.
Also, I've seen colleagues struggle to get screen sharing working on both Windows and Mac; most OSes now don't just allow any program to read from any window, so if someone forgets to allow a permission somewhere, no screen sharing.
I don't want to post the typical "work on my machine" comment, but
I regularly see screen sharing failing on almost any platform.
In many in-person conferences in my field they started to request a copy of the pdf file before the talk, that will be projected and shared using a dedicated computer.
And, as explained, it doesn't matter. The problems, at root, are human psychology and incompatible but popular software, and that's sufficient to drive people away. And the issues are not new: we had exactly that with Windows Vista.
+1. I have tried a bunch of local models (albeit the smaller end, b/c hardware limits), and I can't get handwriting recognition yet. But online Gemini and Claude do great. Hoping the local models catch up soon, as this is a wonderful LLM use case.
UPDATE: I just tried this with the default model on handwriting, and IT WORKED. Took about 5-10 minutes on my laptop, but it worked. I am so thrilled not to have to send my personal jottings into the cloud!
There are good uses for block-chain like things, even beyond sprinking in a mention to help raise grant funding, but the headline-grabbers have generally not been those...
I find this is an extraordinary tool for 90% of needs, and I love that it can interact with multiple models. It is a great example of how to productize the ecosystem in a user-loyal way.
I love this app! I recently went shopping for Linux readers and came right back to Foliate for its common sense and feature-richness beneath a clean UX.
The problem, at root, is Wayland. Zoom has some kind of workaround it seems, but it's not working yet in COSMIC.
The result was sad: speakers having to speak with their slides being run by one of the remote speakers, and anyone who recognized the computer running Zoom as Linux surely strengthened their conviction never to try that.