In the day job we use Microsoft Teams. The good news is that it is running on the Linux Desktop, and specifically KDE. So far, so good, however, there was a problem with screensharing for me.

Whenever I tried to share my KDE screen, the screen became black, surrounded with a red rectangle as indicator for the shared area. The people who I shared with also just saw the black area, and also the mouse pointer as me.

The problem is described in a bugreport and there are two ways of solving it:

  1. Enable compositing: The red indicator rectangle requires that the window manager supports compositing. KWin can of course do that, and with that enabled, sharing works fine including the red rectangle.
  2. If compositing can or should not be used there is another workaround: As the bug report shows, renaming the file /usr/share/teams/resources/app.asar.unpacked/node_modules/slimcore/bin/rect-overlay so that it is not used by teams fixes it as well. Obviously you wont have the red rectangle with this solution.

That said, it is of course preferable to use an open source alternative to Teams to help these evolve.