After upgrading to Ubuntu 17.10 I noticed some of my screencasting applications are not working, for example screencasting tools like SimpleScreenRecorder and vokoscreen. (link)
Also I noticed features like screenshot from GIMP is not working properly, producing blank screenshots (link). Shutter too is producing glitchy screenshots (link).
Screen-sharing option on Skype is also not working (link).
The issue occurs sometimes on later Ubuntu releases too.
Why is this happening and how do I fix this?
Best Answer
Ubuntu 17.10 by default lets users log in to a GNOME environment on a Wayland session. You may check whether you're logged into a Wayland session instead of an Xorg (X11) session by running the following command in Terminal:
Applications which are not compatible with Wayland yet run under a XWayland compatibility layer. But advanced applications, which depend on and/or control X11 server "too much" (screen-capturing/recording etc.), might fail to run in a Wayland session.
As a workaround you may switch back to an Xorg session.