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.
scrot does not seems to work on wayland, but it looks very nice for X11. I’ve also found Flameshot, which claims to work on KDE wayland and, albeit with a forced confirmation dialog, on gnome wayland. I’ll update my post if I tested these tools more thoroughly.