If you utilize Slack on Ubuntu and have faced issues such as screen sharing under Wayland displaying a black screen or causing the entire application to crash, there’s good news. These issues are now resolved.
I’m not an avid Slack user — who would I converse with, myself?! — and although I’m aware that this popular communication platform performs optimally on a Chromium-based web browser (as opposed to Mozilla Firefox), the Slack desktop app for Linux continues to have its own benefits.
However, over the past year or so, I’ve noticed a number of people who use Slack on Ubuntu expressing their frustration with its unreliable screen sharing feature, which for some time was also unavailable.
Slack acknowledged these issues on its community support forum, where a community representative clarified that the company had to temporarily disable the screen sharing function in the Slack Desktop client for Linux (including DEB, RPM, and snap builds) while the glitches were being fixed.
Well, good news: Slack recently issued an update — figuratively (in a new comment to a complaint thread on the support forum) and literally (in the form of an updated build).
Slack 4.38.115 began rolling out a few weeks back and it re-enables the required WebRTC PipeWire features that support screen sharing under Wayland. The update also resolves two bugs that were causing the app to crash when using the feature previously.
They add “sharing windows should now work as expected in Slack 4.38.115 and higher (no black screen)” but note that “engineers are still seeing intermittent issues with some machines where sharing your entire screen still shows as a black screen”.
So your mileage may vary, I guess.
While Slack’s engineers collaborate with upstream Chromium developers to fix the edge-case causes, the screen-sharing features have been (re)enabled for all. If it’s something you’ve been waiting/needing to use, go update to the latest build then give it a try.
On my Ubuntu setup it works. My entire screen is ‘shared’ properly (not a black screen). I did notice that the first time I select the screen to share from the dialog that appears it’s only shared for a second at most. The second time I select it , it streams fine:
No black screen when sharing my desktop (with myself, how sad…)
The Slack Linux Desktop client’s release notes are disappointingly vague. They lack any specific information about fixes, known issues, or platform-specific add-ons, but instead offer charmingly vague phrases like “a few things were tweaked, and the app improved subtly.”
I understand writing change-logs about minor changes can be a chore. And it’s true that most of the details would likely be uninteresting.
However, I would have thought that a popular fix for an important feature like screen sharing would warrant at least a prominent mention, especially since numerous Linux users have been grumbling about this issue for the last year. Anyway, now you know!