[BUG] Freeze mode and light passthrough unavailable on GNOME Wayland

[bitsByB]

Ctrl+Shift+F (freeze) and Ctrl+Shift+L (light passthrough) don't work on GNOME. The passthrough shows "Light Mode requires layer-shell support" error. Freeze does nothing.

This makes it impossible to draw annotations and then interact with apps underneath while drawings remain visible. Real bummer as it's a key workflow for screen-sharing during video calls.

• Wayscriber 0.9.19 (RPM)
• GNOME 47+ on Wayland (Fedora Silverblue/Bluefin)

Thanks!

[devmobasa]

Thanks for the report. This is two separate GNOME Wayland limitations.

TL/DR: Freeze is fixable in the app; live light passthrough is not, unless we build/install a GNOME Shell extension.

Freeze mode should be fixable in wayscriber. GNOME does not expose the wlroots screencopy/layer-shell path we use elsewhere, but it does provide screenshot capture through xdg-desktop-portal. There is a fix in progress to make Ctrl+Shift+F use that portal fallback on GNOME.

Light passthrough is different. The regular wayscriber app cannot reliably implement "annotations stay visible while clicks/keyboard go to apps underneath" on stock GNOME Wayland, because GNOME only gives normal apps xdg-shell windows, not shell-level overlay/layer-shell behavior.
We can improve the error message, but true passthrough on GNOME would require a GNOME Shell extension companion or another GNOME-native overlay tool. And I don't know if people would be willing to do that, and how much of an effort would it be to implement it to work with wayscriber.

If you have an option, you can try the branch gnome-improvements and let me know how it behaves.