Fixing the SimpleScreenRecorder black screen error on Debian Buster
Introduction
The SimpleScreenReorder (SSR) is one of the famous, flexible and, as the name indicates, simplest ways to record things that happen on your Linux box. I use it regularly for small clips to report bugs or for educational reasons. SSR can be installed through various package managers and also built from scratch. You can check how to install the program on your distribution under https://www.maartenbaert.be/simplescreenrecorder/#download .
Problem
After my distribution switch from Ubuntu 18.04 to Debian Buster I ran into a problem which makes SSR complete useless. The problem is that if you install SSR on a default Debian installation, the installation works as expected using APT but if you run the program it will just record a black screen.
The reason behind that behavior is quite simple. Debian Buster (with gdm3) by default uses the Wayland Compositor and not Xorg. But SSR was built for Xorg so it’s not able to communicate with the Wayland server to grab your display content. That simply ends up in a black screen. That is a known issue and also documented on GitHub: https://github.com/MaartenBaert/ssr/issues/431
Solution
To solve the problem, you can tell Debian not to use the Wayland Compositor. In that case, Debian will use the Xorg Server. To achieve that you can edit the “deamon.conf” located under “/etc/gdm3”.
In line 7 you will find an entry called “WaylandEnable=false” which is commented out. Just edit the file as root / with sudo and remove the starting “#” so that the config look like the screen below.
After saving the configuration, reboot your system and check the SSR functionality.
Voila! SSR is now able to capture your screen.
Keep in mind
Please think about, what the switch from Wayland to Xorg means for your system. It could happen that you already have Wayland only programs installed which will simply not work with Xorg. So treat this as a “workaround “ because Wayland will replace Xorg in the future. For the most users using Xorg will not have such a big impact because the most programs will still work with Xorg. But if you want to use Wayland, SSR will (at the moment) not work for you. In that case you might have a look on EsayScreenCast or the OBS project.