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lemmy - Link to source

Gnome extension on KDE?

I know the title sounds a little strange but hear me out. The time tracking software I use for work doesn’t work on Wayland, unless I’m using Gnome as my DE. They have an extension that allows it to work in this case. Personally, I don’t enjoy Gnome on my desktop (I use it on my laptop). Is there a way for me to get the functionality that this extension provides on KDE so that I can use Wayland on my desktop as well?

Time tracking software:
- hubstaff.com/
- support.hubstaff.com/screensho…

Linux install script:
- codeberg.org/governorkeagan/hu…

EDIT: I have included more files in the codeberg repo. I hope this helps.


Screenshot capture support for Wayland - Linux - Hubstaff Support

Currently, Wayland doesn't support screenshot capture with usual apps, like Hubstaff for example. Learn more about this here.
Kelvin Diaz (Hubstaff Support)
This entry was edited (9 months ago)
in reply to governorkeagan

boredsquirrel
lemmy - Link to source
boredsquirrel
• •

Looks useful. So this software detects how long you spend on what app?

This may be compositor dependent but just a guess. Thats a problem of Wayland (currently)

The port will be huge and just making the extension run not enough.

This entry was edited (9 months ago)
in reply to boredsquirrel

governorkeagan
lemmy - Link to source
governorkeagan
• •

Pretty much. My company has it set to track the following:

  • Periodic screenshots
  • Mouse and keyboard activity
  • Apps used
  • URLs visited

All of this is combined to determine how active you were (as a percentage), you can then try and determine how much time was spent on productive vs non-productive work. However, we use it as a glorified timesheet.

in reply to governorkeagan

sun_is_ra
lemmy - Link to source
sun_is_ra
• •
If the tracking software is open source what is stopping employees from changing source code to their advantage ?
in reply to sun_is_ra

governorkeagan
lemmy - Link to source
governorkeagan
• •
It’s not open source. I just added it to codeberg for easy sharing to ask this question
in reply to governorkeagan

boredsquirrel
lemmy - Link to source
boredsquirrel
• •

I dont think they actually take screenshots, do they? That would be awfully inefficient. You can get the window titles in better ways.

the URL stuff should use a browser extension to tell them that name.

If that app really takes screenshots and extracts URLs from them, it is pretty overcomplex. But that improves platform-independence a lot

in reply to boredsquirrel

Skull giver
lemmy - Link to source
Skull giver
• •
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This entry was edited (9 months ago)
in reply to governorkeagan

Skull giver
lemmy - Link to source
Skull giver
• •
[This comment has been deleted by an automated system]
This entry was edited (9 months ago)
in reply to governorkeagan

Sam Black
lemmy - Link to source
Sam Black
• •

The GNOME extension appears to get the currently focused window information (ie name, title, PID and executable name) and make this information available over DBUS for the client binary.

The client binary calls gnome-screenshot -f and I assume gives a path that the client binary then sends to Hubstaff servers.

A janky suggestion would be to create a Kwin Script that pulls the active window information, sends it (somehow) to a DBUS service that can provide it to the client binary and create a wrapper script around spectacle to pretend to be gnome-screenshot (eg spectacle -b -f $@)

I don't know if this would work fully though as the client binary strings seem to hint it checks the running version of GNOME Shell, and without an account I can't see if this is a hard requirement or a "Hey, this is broken, we'll try our best!" type thing.

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