Green Recorder

» see github.com/mhsabbagh/green-recorder as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Recording your own screen was a solved problem on Linux until Wayland arrived. X11 let any process read the whole display. That was terrible for security and wonderful for screen recorders, and a generation of small tools got built on the permissiveness. Wayland closed the door on purpose. Every recorder that worked by reading the framebuffer stopped working, and for a while the answer on a Wayland desktop was that you could not record it at all.

Green Recorder was the first desktop application to answer otherwise. It was a small GTK window with a handful of checkboxes, written in Python, that shelled out to ffmpeg on X11 and to GNOME's own screencast interface on Wayland, so the user never had to know which session they were in. The repository was created on 4 February 2017 and the first release landed six days later. Fourteen releases followed over the next two years, up to 3.2.2 in March 2019, and the project picked up 626 stars along with writeups on most of the Linux news sites.

On 3 August 2019 its author pushed one commit. It touched a single file, the README, and it was titled "Goodbye, Green Recorder". He archived the repository to read-only the same day, and the GitHub timestamps put the last push and the archiving within minutes of each other. Nobody got a deprecation window and nothing went up on his blog. Not one of the Linux sites that had covered the releases covered the ending.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the part wayland made impossible ~

The architecture explains the maintenance burden better than any complaint about it could. On X11 the tool could call ffmpeg directly and own its behavior end to end. On Wayland it had to ask the desktop environment to do the recording, through GNOME's screencast D-Bus interface, and then hope the result came back in a usable container. That is two completely different pipelines behind one checkbox, and neither of the components doing the real work belonged to Green Recorder.

It also never got into a distribution big enough to share the load. Ubuntu and Debian never carried it, and neither did Fedora. You installed it from the author's own PPA or from an AUR package, with a third-party RPM repository as the only other option. The PPA figures come to 29,902 downloads across its distinct versions. That is a serious number of installs for a one-person project and a meaningless number of co-maintainers.

~ the line about doing it for free ~

The archived README still opens with the reason, and the reason is unusually blunt about labor: the work of maintaining and updating the program took too much of his time, "which I was giving for free", and he was no longer interested in working with ffmpeg or Wayland, or in answering the question of why GNOME's screencaster did not behave. Then he pointed at the GPL and invited anyone to fork it. Sabbagh is from Aleppo and was living in Istanbul when he archived it, and he had already built an Arabic Linux publication and a distribution before this. I was in Ankara the whole time Green Recorder existed and never installed it once. Useful software written by a stranger in the same country usually ends up exactly that invisible.

~ the forks ~

Nine months after the archiving, Danila Vershinin forked the Python codebase and carried the version numbers forward to 3.2.10 in June 2021. The AUR package now points at that fork rather than the original, so a user installing "green-recorder" on Arch today gets someone else's copy. Its last code commit was March 2022.

The real successor was a rewrite. Blue Recorder, started by Salem Yaslem in January 2021, describes itself in its own repository as a screen recorder in Rust based on Green Recorder, inherits the same one-line summary about supporting Wayland and Xorg, ships on Flathub, and was still getting releases in June 2026. The original is still there at 3.2.2, read-only, and the goodbye is the first thing in its README.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »