how to fix niri screen share

2026-01-22

What is the issue?

1. The main issue here is the portal you do not have the correct portals.
2. Niri is not starting correctly.
3. Portals are overidden by other portals or .

Let's address them one by one

1. For niri you only need these two(three) necessary portal to do screen sharing

xdg-desktop-portal
xdg-desktop-portal-gnome
xdg-desktop-portal-gtk

find these packages in your corresponding distro and install them.

2. to fix this you just have to run this on startup(tty)

# systemd
niri-session
# others
dbus-run-session niri --session

3. To address this issue,

• we are just going to create a config file to specifically tell these backend are going to be used for these tasks.

~/.config/xdg-desktop-portal

[preferred]
org.freedesktop.impl.portal.FileChooser=gnome;
org.freedesktop.impl.portal.ScreenCast=gnome;
org.freedesktop.impl.portal.Screenshot=gnome;
org.freedesktop.impl.portal.RemoteDesktop=gnome;

ref: niri wiki