Arch Linux

Gophner

Member

Registered: 2025-05-07

Posts: 1

Screenshare not working - problem with XDG desktop portals

Hi. I have a fresh install of Arch, on which I've put dwl as my compositor. I've been trying to get screensharing to work (particularly with discord, but it won't work for anything) and I've been having some issues. I've tried to follow the guide on web RTC screensharing and installed pipewire and XDG desktop portal, although I think I'm having issues with the desktop portal.

The error I'm having is that when I try to share my screen on Discord, (I tried using Mozilla's screen capture as well with the same result) the application is unresponsive. It's not like it pops up a window selection or is black, it just doesn't do anything. There is an accompanying message in the terminal when running through the terminal which I could paste, although I'm not sure if this would be informative or TMI.

To my understanding (from the xdg desktop wiki page) I have to install backends to work with the desktop portal. In particular, I believe the backends generally depend on desktop environment. Since dwl isn't a desktop environment, I've installed the wlroots (xdg-desktop-portal-wlr) and the gtk (xdg-desktop-portal-gtk) as a fallback. I installed the wlroots portal because dwl is a fork of wlroots and I figured it might play nicely, and the gtk because the wiki says it works for generic desktop environments.

Then I moved on to the configuring my portal. The wiki (same page) says that the portal will use

/usr/share/xdg-desktop-portal/DE-portals.conf

file. where DE is set by the XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP variable. This is where I think I first run into issues. I believe that since I don't have a DE this is not defined on my system. I ran

echo $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP

and it printed nothing which I think means it's not set. So I followed the advice in the next part of the section and created a portals.conf file in the same directory, specifying a default portal and all that.

I also tried to follow the wiki's advice and trick my system into thinking I have a DE although the file path it specifies

~/.config/systemd/user/xdg-desktop-portal.service.d/override.conf

does not exist (in particular, there is no systemd directory in my ~/.config directory).

I've also followed the "Portal does not start" help section of the wiki and tried setting a value for XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP, although this has not changed anything.

I also tried following the help from these two (1, 2) help pages, although I couldn't seem to get what they were doing to work for me (or there's just too much user error on my end).

I've been trying to get this to work for a little while, and I can't quite figure it out. I am a bit of a noob when it comes to linux (I was considering between posting here and in newbie corner, although this felt more specific to this section) so I suspect there's a bit of user error as well. Any help would be appreciated.

Last edited by Gophner (2025-05-07 15:05:22)