At work, we use Microsoft Teams, and we used to (and sort of still) use Slack. I recently switched from a Macbook Pro to a Linux laptop (again), and what annoys me greatly is that when I “share screen/application” in the Slack or Teams app it offers me only to share my entire monitor.
Sure, it’s annoying that I can’t pick what window is shared; but what makes it unbearable for other people on my team is that my monitor is ultra-wide so everything I share becomes really tiny on their screen. Sorry.
Chrome can do it!
By accident, I stumbled upon that Slack running in Chrome on Linux can share windows just fine. The native Slack app does not. So I went on an adventure to figure out how to add web-apps to the Linux desktop and it’s surprisingly hard to find (hence this post).
Chrome used to have a link in “More Tools -> Add to Desktop”, but no more; and that had me confused. It’s now called “More Tools -> Create Shortcut”.
Just navigate to the site you want to open as an application, click “Create Shortcut” from the menu, check “Open as Window” and you’re good.
On Linux, this will create a .desktop file in ~/.local/applications so that your desktop environment will pick it up. This guide should also work fine on Windows and Mac.
Plus, it’s better!
Today, I’m running Outlook, Slack and Teams as progressive-web-applications and the performance is much better, screen/window sharing works and it uses less CPU than the Electron apps.