I’m running Ubuntu 26.04 LTS on Framework Laptop 12 13th Gen Intel Core Intel® i5-1334U × 12 Graphics (RPL-U) Firmware 03.07 GNOME 50 Linux 7.0.0-15-generic with 16 gb memory 1tb disk processing and Wayland.
I recently spilled water on my surface pro 7 destroying it and decided to take the plunge with the Framework 12. I’m super excited about switching to Linux from Microsoft but I’m completely new and have learned basic things like how to update on the command line and move around with commands like ls and cd.
I use video conferencing regularly for work on Microsoft Teams, Google meet, and Zoom, and a lot of issues come up where I’m unable to enter the call, or I enter and people can see and hear me but I can’t see or hear them. Or if I enter a call, the connection disappears frequently, disrupting the call on my end. When I join on my iphone video calls work fine. I tried different browsers like Firefox, Mullvad, LibreWolf, Vivaldi, and it seemed like the best working was joining through the browser on Chromium. I tested it with a friend and it worked fine for zoom and teams. Then the next day, I was having the same major video issues.
From what I’ve read there’s a lot of incompatibility issues with the Wayland Windowing System but I don’t know how to fix this if at all. I understand there used to be a X11 Windowing System that has since been discontinued on Ubuntu 26.04.
Are you using the snap versions of these things or the flatpack versions of the software?
A lot of legacy software will try to run in X11 via toolkits to emulate the old windowing system but my experience is that snaps apparmor can cause immense headaches and increased CPU load trying to use these things. (For example, you can run discord in wayland despite there not being a dedicated wayland version yet AFAIK. Its just the wayland based wrapper will restrict some of the insecurities of X11.)
The flathub versions will run with similar sandboxing/dependency handling but with a lot less frustration in my experience. Only issue being was I found that even uninstalling things via snap here to be extremely frustrating and annoying without using the command line with specific arguments to tell it you wish to uninstall the snaps definitively.
Ubuntu’s done a lot of good work for linux but I’ll admit my experience with it has been frustration.
Zoom at least has a native app for Linux. You can find it on their web site. Seems to work fine for me on a FW13 running Debian 13 with KDE Plasma (I don’t use Gnome). Might work better than the web version, could be worth trying.
You can also get Google Chrome for Linux. That might work better with Meet and Teams.
Finally, one difference between Wayland and X11 is that the X11 display is a standalone thing that all desktops use, while for Wayland each desktop has to implement its own compositor. Historically speaking that means that each one had different bugs.
Running some of the apps in a browser is my current preferred way of using them for some of the software that hasn’t gone wayland yet. X11 even in its emulated in wayland state has some behaviors that make applications that are X11 based mildly concerning.
Thanks for the feedback. I downloaded Zoom previously but the issue was not so much the call but screensharing ability. It displayed only a black screen no matter what I did, which I’ve read is potentially a Wayland issue.
It might be a Wayland issue with Gnome (or whatever Ubuntu uses these days), but Zoom screen sharing works fine for me with KDE Plasma running on Wayland. This is what I meant about particular Wayland implementations not being the same.
Another possibility regarding screen-sharing is that you need to have the appropriate “xdg-desktop-portal” package installed. For KDE on Debian that’s “xdg-desktop-portal-kde”, while for Gnome it is “xdg-desktop-portal-gtk”.