I’ve got one of those crazy-wide screens that I usually use at 5120x1440 and it’s great. However, since I work remote, I often want to share my screen with someone on a typical 16:9 screen and the options of “tab”, “window” or “entire screen” aren’t particularly useful because I need to switch between windows a lot as part of the sharing session: terminal, IDE, browser, back to the terminal, etc.

I’d like to be able share either (a) a portion of the screen (half?) or (b) change my resolution temporarily to something like 2650x1440 and just share the whole screen.

The problem is that as far as I can tell, (a) isn’t an option, and while I can (b) change my resolution to something 16:9, it renders wide across the screen turning effectively every pixel is a wide rectangle. It’s… hard to look at.

I’m using Arch with GNOME+Wayland. Is there some way for me to do either of the above?

EDIT: I found a nifty little Python script that does exactly what I was hoping for in (b) above. Apparently this is a built-in feature for Wayland, but most browsers don’t implement it (yet?)

  • Crozekiel@lemmy.zip
    English
    2·
    17 hours ago

    OH - check if your monitor supports PBP - Picture by Picture. Some Ultra-wides have this functionality, and you can run two cables from the computer to the monitor (assuming you have 2 video outs) and the monitor itself will show up in the OS as two smaller monitors instead of one big one. If your monitor has this feature and you have two video outputs, it sounds like it would do exactly what you want.

    Also, to add to what others have said, OBS will very likely do almost everything you are wanting, but if you want to be able to have your “webcam” and “screenshare” separate I have a silly solution for you… Use OBS to get the half of the monitor you want to share piped into it, but instead of using the virtual camera, pare down everything in OBS you don’t need to see so it is basically just the preview and then in the meeting software share the OBS window. You can still use your normal webcam setup for your face, and a “screen share” option for your screen share, not limited to any windows (even though the thing thinks it is limited to OBS, but OBS sees the other windows you need and just takes up a little bit of border area). It’s silly, and it isn’t perfect, but it gets you 90% of the way there.