Screen share show black screen after upgrade from Ubuntu 20.10 to 21.04

Screen share shows just a black screen after the upgrade from Ubuntu 20.10 to 21.04. It was working fine until 20.10.

Tried in Google Chrome, Firefox, etc. all of them shows just the black screen. It is not related to the browser.

Any idea how to fix this?

4 Answers

An alternative solution, from:

• How to disable Wayland and enable Xorg display server on Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver Linux
• How to enable/disable wayland on Ubuntu 20.04 Desktop

sudoedit /etc/gdm3/custom.conf

Uncomment the line

#WaylandEnable=false

and save the change. This will enable the Xorg display manager.

Then either

sudo systemctl restart gdm3

Or just reboot the system.

This reportedly works on the following versions:

• 18.04
• 20.04
• 21.10
• 22.04 LTS

Looks like Ubuntu 21.04 defaults to Wayland - when I switch to Xorg, screenshare works fine.

If anyone wants to try this, these are the steps:

1. In the login screen, click the setting icon
2. Choose "Ubuntu On Xorg" instead of "Ubuntu"
3. Now login

Screenshare should work now.

If you are using Chrome and prefer to use Wayland and do not want to switch back to Xorg, activate the following flag in the browser:

chrome://flags/#enable-webrtc-pipewire-capturer

From the flag description:

When enabled the WebRTC will use the PipeWire multimedia server for capturing the desktop content on the Wayland display server

This issue can be resolved by editing custom.conf file located /etc/gdm3/

You can use nano text editor to perform this task by running sudo nano /etc/gdm3/custom.conf on your terminal and remove comment on #WaylandEnable=false by deleting #.

Before editing

After editing

Save the changes and reboot your computer.