Kooha, the app to record the screen to keep in mind now that everyone is looking at Wayland

kooha

In about 48 hours, Canonical will release Ubuntu 21.04 Hirsute Hippo and all its official flavors. The truth is that the main version will arrive with few important news, but it will pave the way for future versions. One of the most striking changes is that it will use Wayland by default, the graphical server protocol that can offer a lot, but is currently not standardized. For that reason, right now there are few applications like kooha.

For record screen of a Linux-based operating system there are many Options. One that is used a lot is SimpleScreenRecorder, precisely because it is a simple screen recorder. The problem is, at least as of this writing, it doesn't work in Wayland. The app that does work is Kooha, and it is also very simple, but it is taking its first steps and still has to improve in some aspects, such as support.

Kooha works on GNOME

From the looks of it, Kooha uses GNOME's native and little-known recording system to take screenshots. That would explain why it works only in the graphical environment used by distributions like Ubuntu or Fedora. And it doesn't just work on Wayland; we can also use it in X11. As for how simple it is, its interface makes it impossible to get confused: on the main screen we have six buttons: one to choose to record the full screen, another a rectangular area, below we can choose to record the sound of the system, the microphone and that the pointer is shown and below we have the button to record.

In the options, the only thing we can configure is a delay time so that we have time to minimize the application and the format in which we will save it, among which we can choose MKV or WebM. From the same section we can also see the keyboard shortcuts.

But Kooha has a difficult to understand flaw: we can't minimize the app. We have two options: one is to leave the window in the middle of the scene. The other is, if our distribution does not have it that way by default, making a click on the dock icon minimize the applications, something that we can achieve by typing this command:

gsettings set org.gnome.shell.extensions.dash-to-dock click-action 'minimize'

If we want to undo the change, we have to change 'set' to 'reset' and remove 'minimize'.

To install Kooha, the best option is to install your flatpak package, although Arch Linux users also have it in AUR. It can also be installed with these commands:

git clone https://github.com/SeaDve/Kooha.git
cd Kooha
meson builddir --prefix=/usr/local
ninja -C builddir install

While waiting for other apps to update and add support for Wayland, Kooha is an option. At least for GNOME users.


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