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Take screenshot in linux using dotnet (lemmy.sdf.org)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 6 days ago) by [email protected] to c/dotnet
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I want to take a screenshot. In Windows, that's a simple Graphics::CopyFromScreen call.

In Linux, I feel a little confused on how to do this. It seems there is a principal and stark distinction between X11 and Wayland, so I have to include both code paths. For either, it seems there is quite a lot of boilerplate code, often tagged as 'may break depending on your configuration, good luck'.

Effectively, what I found is recommended most often is to call ffmpeg to let it handle that. I'm sure that works, but I find it rather unpalatable.

I find this strange. Taking a screenshot is, in my mind at least, supposed to be a straightforward part of a standard library. Perhaps it is, and I just completely missed it? If not, is there a good library that works out-of-the-box on most variants of linux?

Update: Thank you all for the input. I eventually went with calling ImageMagick. It is fast, easy to use, well documented, and supports capturing arbitrary displays with little effort.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Taking a screenshot in Wayland is tricky, even more so in C#. I'm not aware of a up to date library that takes care of these things for you on Linux in C#.

Your best bet for a clean solution is most likely using the org.freedesktop.portal.Desktop portal via d-bus.

There's a d-bus library for C#: https://github.com/tmds/Tmds.DBus

Essentially you want to call org.freedesktop.portal.Screenshot.Screenshot on org.freedesktop.portal.Desktop and then get the file path for the screenshot from the object path that gets returned.

Here's a quick example to take a screenshot from the terminal:

gdbus call --session   --dest org.freedesktop.portal.Desktop   --object-path /org/freedesktop/portal/desktop   --method org.freedesktop.portal.Screenshot.Screenshot   ":1.0"    "{}"

https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/docs/doc-org.freedesktop.impl.portal.Screenshot.html#org-freedesktop-impl-portal-screenshot-screenshot

Other solutions that work via Wayland are:

  • Getting a screen capture via Pipewire
  • Call window manager specific d-bus APIs (e.g. org.kde.KWin.ScreenShot2)

You need to test with different desktop environments though, the amount of user interaction required to take a screenshot on Wayland varies.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

Thank you so much for the detailed reply!