When trying to use my company chat app “Rocket.Chat” i was struggling to get the desktop share to work. i’m using Rocket.Chat as a flatpak app on my manjaro machine. when i select a desktop to share the screen was always just black. this did not happen on a X11 session, so i got stuck on x11 until this problem will be fixed by me! today was the day…

a bit of googling brought me to the conclusion that i have to tell the electron app to use the WebRTCPipeWireCapturer feature. here’s my fairly easy way to achieve this.

find your currently used .desktop file for rocket chat. mine was at /var/lib/flatpak/exports/share/applications/chat.rocket.RocketChat.desktop and copy it to your users local applications dir:

# cp /var/lib/flatpak/exports/share/applications/chat.rocket.RocketChat.desktop ~/.local/share/applications

fire up an editor of your choice with the freshly created file (which takes precendence over the default one):

# nano ~/.local/share/applications/chat.rocket.RocketChat.desktop

and chat the executable line to:

Exec=/usr/bin/flatpak run --branch=stable --arch=x86_64 --file-forwarding chat.rocket.RocketChat @@u %U @@ --command=/app/bin/rocketchat-desktop --enable-features=WebRTCPipeWireCapturer

my resulting file looks like this:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Rocket.Chat
#Exec=/usr/bin/flatpak run --branch=stable --arch=x86_64 --command=/app/bin/rocketchat-desktop --file-forwarding chat.rocket.RocketChat @@u %U @@
Exec=/usr/bin/flatpak run --branch=stable --arch=x86_64 --file-forwarding chat.rocket.RocketChat @@u %U @@ --command=/app/bin/rocketchat-desktop --enable-features=WebRTCPipeWireCapturer
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Icon=chat.rocket.RocketChat
StartupWMClass=Rocket.Chat
MimeType=x-scheme-handler/rocketchat
Comment=Official OSX, Windows, and Linux Desktop Clients for Rocket.Chat
Categories=GNOME;GTK;Network;InstantMessaging;
X-Desktop-File-Install-Version=0.26
X-Flatpak-RenamedFrom=rocketchat-desktop.desktop;
X-Flatpak=chat.rocket.RocketChat

restart rocket.chat and you’re good to go. you will see a new switcher which lets you choose what to share after the original one from rocket.chat.

this should work for any electron app.

note that in my case the --command argument had to be the last one, otherwise my rocket.chat would not start…