Screen recorder for Linux

How to screen record on Linux in this tab

1. Click Start recording and choose a browser tab, a window or your entire screen. To include a tab's sound in Chrome or Edge, share the tab and tick Share audio.
2. On Wayland, confirm in your desktop's dialog. When you share a window or the whole screen, GNOME, KDE and other Wayland desktops show their own sharing dialog, and you pick the screen or window there.
3. Record, then stop. Pause and resume as often as you like. Click Stop and save or your browser's “Stop sharing” button, play it back, and download it.

The extra dialog is the desktop portal: on Wayland, browsers ask the desktop for the screen and receive it over PipeWire (a 2020 WebRTC change moved Chrome's Wayland picking into that dialog). According to Red Hat's support article (checked October 2026), PipeWire capture is on by default from Chrome 110, and Firefox needs no extra steps. On X11 the browser reads the screen directly and the desktop dialog doesn't appear.

What you get on Linux, by browser:

No watermark and no time limit set by us. The recording stays in the tab until you download it and is never uploaded (see our security page). For zooms, a background or captions, click Add zooms in the editor: it needs a free account and gives you 2 watermarked exports a month; $29 once (or $12.49 a month) removes the watermark. The same recorder is on our main free screen recorder page.

Built-in screen recorders on Linux

GNOME (Ubuntu, Fedora): Shift+Ctrl+Alt+R

GNOME has a recorder inside its screenshot tool, so Ubuntu and Fedora Workstation have one out of the box. According to GNOME's help page (checked October 2026):

1. Press Print, or use the screenshot button in the system menu.
2. Click the video camera icon (or press V) to switch to screencast mode.
3. Choose Selection or Screen. Press P to show or hide the pointer.
4. Click the big round red button. A red indicator in the top-right corner counts the seconds.
5. Click that red indicator in the top bar to stop.

Shift+Ctrl+Alt+R starts a screencast straight away, without opening the tool. Recordings are saved in ~/Videos/Screencasts, with a file name that starts with “Screencast” and includes the date and time.

The catch is sound: GNOME's recorder saves video without audio. A request to add system audio has been open on GNOME's issue tracker since May 2022 and was still open in October 2026. GNOME's help also lists only two areas for a screencast, a selection or the whole screen, not a single window.

KDE Plasma: Spectacle

On KDE Plasma 6, the Spectacle screenshot app also records video. According to KDE's Plasma 6 announcement (checked October 2026):

• Meta+R or Meta+Shift+R records a region.
• Meta+Alt+R records the full screen.
• Meta+Ctrl+R records a window.
• While recording, an icon in the system tray shows the elapsed time; click it to stop.
• Recordings go to ~/Videos/Screencasts, with quality settings and VP9 encoding available.

KDE's announcement doesn't list audio capture. If you need sound, use one of the recorders below.

Best screen recorders for Linux, compared

ZoomCap comes first because we make it, and we say plainly where it stops. ZoomCap's two rows describe our own product. Every other row comes from that project's own site, README or Flathub listing (apt versions from Ubuntu's package index), checked October 2026, not from our own testing; the last column links to the page we read (our method). For Windows and Mac tools, see our best free screen recorders.

ZoomCap: free in the browser, automatic zoom on X11

The browser recorder is the shortest path on any distribution and any session. For demos and tutorials, the terminal recorder goes further: it records your X11 screen while tracking clicks and bursts of typing, then opens the editor with zooms already placed, which keeps viewers on the right spot in a terminal or an IDE. The limit: On Linux the CLI records video only (X11 sessions, no Wayland, no system audio yet). It costs $29 once (or $12.49 a month), refundable within 14 days if it doesn't work for you and we can't fix it. Our Screen Studio alternatives for Linux guide compares ZoomCap with the other Linux recorders that zoom automatically.

OBS Studio: streaming and the computer's sound

OBS Studio is free and open source (GPL-2.0), no limits. OBS 27.0 added Wayland support with a PipeWire capture source, and it records desktop audio and microphones. The project officially distributes it on Flathub and as a PPA for Ubuntu 24.04 and newer:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:obsproject/obs-studio
sudo apt update
sudo apt install obs-studio

It's a full capture and streaming studio, with a learning curve and no editor. Pick it if you stream, mix several sources, or need the whole computer's sound.

Kooha: one button, desktop audio on Wayland

Kooha records the microphone, desktop audio or both, and saves WebM, MP4, GIF or Matroska. It captures through xdg-desktop-portal and PipeWire, so it needs a portal backend for your desktop (gtk, kde or wlr, its README says). Install it with flatpak install flathub io.github.seadve.Kooha; Ubuntu 25.10 and newer also package it as kooha.

GPU Screen Recorder: games and low CPU load

GPU Screen Recorder encodes on the GPU and works on X11 and Wayland with AMD, Intel and NVIDIA graphics, according to its README. It's a command-line tool with two optional interfaces, and the Flathub package (com.dec05eba.gpu_screen_recorder) includes both the CLI and the UI. On AMD and Intel graphics and on Wayland, recording a whole monitor directly needs root access to KMS, so it asks for your password when you start; recording a window, or using the desktop portal on Wayland, doesn't. It also has an instant-replay mode that keeps only the last few minutes.

SimpleScreenRecorder, Kazam and Peek: X11 tools

These three appear in most Linux recorder lists, and all three are built for X11. SimpleScreenRecorder records OpenGL apps directly and is in Ubuntu's repositories as simplescreenrecorder. On Wayland its author writes that “SSR can't support it (yet)”. Download it only from the author's page, which warns that simplescreenrecorder.com is a fake site.

Kazam 2.0.0 (August 2024, via pip install kazam) lists webcam, OCR and live-streaming features; Ubuntu's package is still version 1.4.5. A bug report about black recordings on Wayland has been open since 2022, with new reports on Ubuntu 24.04 and Kubuntu 26.04. Peek made short GIFs and silent WebM clips; it was declared deprecated and archived on September 24, 2025. To make a GIF today, record on this page and use our MP4 to GIF converter.

vokoscreenNG: tutorials with click highlights

vokoscreenNG records the screen, an area or a window, with a camera window. On X11 it adds a magnifier, Showclick and Halo click effects and global shortcuts; on Wayland it drops those but can record separate audio tracks, according to its Flathub listing. Install it from Flathub or with sudo apt install vokoscreen-ng.

Wayland vs X11: why some recorders record a black screen

On X11, any program can read the whole screen and every mouse click. Wayland removed that on purpose: an app can't see other windows. To record, it asks through the ScreenCast portal, the desktop shows a dialog where you pick a monitor or a window, and the picture arrives as a PipeWire stream. A recorder built only for X11 gets a black frame or nothing on Wayland, which is the bug Kazam users report.

Check which session you're in:

echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE   # prints wayland or x11

Switching to X11 is getting harder. Since Ubuntu 25.10, the login screen no longer offers an “Ubuntu on Xorg” session; GNOME on Ubuntu is Wayland only, according to Ubuntu's announcement. X11 apps still run there through XWayland, but X11-only recorders still can't capture the Wayland desktop. If you need X11 for SimpleScreenRecorder, Kazam or ZoomCap's terminal recorder, Ubuntu points to its non-GNOME flavors.

Linux screen recorder with audio: PipeWire and PulseAudio

Linux recorders capture the computer's sound by recording a “monitor” source: a copy of what goes to your speakers or headphones. Recorders written for PulseAudio usually work on PipeWire systems too, through PipeWire's PulseAudio compatibility, so the same steps apply to both:

• In OBS, Kooha or GPU Screen Recorder, choose desktop audio or the “Monitor of” your output device, and your microphone separately if you narrate.
• If a recording is silent, open pavucontrol while recording, go to the Recording tab, and check that the recorder is capturing the monitor source, not the mic, and that the source isn't muted. SimpleScreenRecorder's troubleshooting page also says to check that the monitor channel isn't muted.
• In the browser, Chrome and Edge record one tab's sound when you share that tab with Share audio ticked. They don't offer the whole computer's sound on Linux, and Firefox records your mic only.
• GNOME's built-in recorder and ZoomCap's terminal recorder record video only on Linux. Add narration or music afterwards; ZoomCap's editor has seven built-in music tracks.

Every system's options are in our guide to screen recording with audio.

Record your screen from the Linux terminal

ZoomCap CLI on X11

1. Check you're on X11: echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE should print x11.
2. Have Node 18 or newer. ZoomCap uses your system ffmpeg if there is one, otherwise a bundled copy.
3. Run npx zoomcap doctor. It reports your session type, ffmpeg and displays. X11 has no permissions to grant.
4. With several monitors, run npx zoomcap displays (listed in xrandr order, primary first) and add --display 1 or another number when you record.
5. Run npx zoomcap record, sign in once in the browser tab it opens, do your demo, and press q or Ctrl+C to stop.
6. The editor opens with zooms on your clicks and typing. The files stay in ~/Videos/ZoomCap/ and reach the editor over localhost, never through our servers. Export an MP4 up to 4K or a GIF.

On Linux it encodes with software x264, so a 4K screen at the default 60 fps may drop frames; --fps 30 helps. Fractional HiDPI scaling can make the cursor position drift. The CLI is part of Pro and Lifetime; see pricing.

Raw capture with ffmpeg (X11)

For a plain recording with no editor, ffmpeg's x11grab input reads the X11 screen. Without -video_size it captures the full desktop:

ffmpeg -f x11grab -framerate 30 -i :0.0 -c:v libx264 -preset veryfast -pix_fmt yuv420p screen.mp4

:0.0 is the first display; echo $DISPLAY shows yours. Press q to stop. To add your microphone, add ffmpeg's PulseAudio input:

ffmpeg -f x11grab -framerate 30 -i :0.0 -f pulse -i default \
  -c:v libx264 -preset veryfast -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:a aac screen.mp4

For the computer's sound instead, replace default with your output's monitor source; pactl list short sources lists it, ending in .monitor. To record a region, set a size and an offset, for example -video_size 1280x720 -i :0.0+100,200. x11grab doesn't work on Wayland.

On Wayland: GPU Screen Recorder's CLI

GPU Screen Recorder's README documents a portal option for Wayland. From the Flathub install, this records through the desktop's dialog with the computer's sound; stop it with Ctrl+C:

flatpak run --command=gpu-screen-recorder com.dec05eba.gpu_screen_recorder \
  -w portal -f 60 -a default_output -o video.mp4

Fixes for Linux screen recording problems

• Black screen on Wayland: the recorder is X11-only (SimpleScreenRecorder, Kazam, Peek outside GNOME, ffmpeg x11grab). Use a portal-based recorder, such as this page, OBS's PipeWire source, Kooha or GPU Screen Recorder with -w portal, or log in to an X11 session where one is offered.
• The sharing dialog never appears: install xdg-desktop-portal and the backend for your desktop (xdg-desktop-portal-gnome, -kde, or -wlr on Sway and other wlroots compositors), make sure PipeWire is running, then log out and back in. On Chrome older than 110, enable chrome://flags/#enable-webrtc-pipewire-capturer.
• No sound: in the browser, share a tab and tick Share audio, or turn Microphone on. In a desktop app, pick the monitor source, then check pavucontrol as described above. GNOME's recorder never records sound.
• No cursor in the video: the portal leaves the pointer out unless the app asks for it, so turn on the recorder's pointer option (Kooha and GNOME both have one).
• Notifications vanish while recording on KDE: Plasma can turn notifications off while the screen is shared through the portal. In Plasma's notification settings, under Do Not Disturb mode, untick “During screen sharing”.
• Dropped frames: record at 30 fps, record a window instead of a 4K screen, or use GPU Screen Recorder, which encodes on the graphics card.

Frequently asked questions

Record your Linux screen now

Scroll up and click Start recording: it works on Wayland and X11 and costs nothing. When you want the video to zoom in on your clicks and typing without editing, run npx zoomcap record on X11, or open any recording in the editor and place zooms by hand. The editor is free to try, and $29 once (or $12.49 a month) removes the watermark. Everything the free recorder does on other systems is on the online screen recorder page.