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.