Arch Linux User Repository

Hi all, for the last 3 months I've been unable to get any sound/microphone in Zoom. I use https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/alibpulse (a differently packaged form of apulse), as an alternative to the full pulseaudio server. Initially (3 months ago) this worked fine, at which point it didn't (I don't know at what version of Zoom this started to fail, haven't checked). Within my logs it was clear that this has something to do with Zoom not being able to find/use pactl (which is part of libpulse, but not part of apulse).

Well, doing some googling I found that Zoom actually supports ALSA (since version 2.0.57232.0713, see https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/205759689-New-updates-for-Linux). There is not other documentation about this that I could find, but when I looked into ~/.config/zoomus.conf I saw there is a line with system.audio.type=default. Again no documentation on this, so I played with it and when I set it to system.audio.type=alsa Zoom started using ALSA directly, and now I have working audio/microphone in Zoom! I hope people find this useful :)

EDIT 1: typos

@matthias @bidskii @ph2545 I was having the same issue with SSO login failing with the 'referrer policy' warning. In my case this turned out to be an issue with the embedded browser zoom was using to open my SSO login.

I was able to resolve this by editing ~/.config/zoomus.conf with the line embeddedBrowserForSSOLogin=false. After restarting zoom, clicking "sign in with SSO" now opened my default browser (Firefox), and I was able to successfully login.

Found the idea from a somewhat similar GitHub issue: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/69352

I contacted the zoom support on 13th July 2016 and tried to lure them into creating a proper PKGBUILD respectively adopting this one, considering they are providing a package over very none standard ways to the Arch Linux community (downloading via a *foreign* site) and not through the official repo or the AUR. However there was little to no progress so far.

if you have problems with broken autoscaling, this can be disabled: ~/.config/zoomus.conf: autoScale=false

@je-vv I use jack2 with alsa-plugin and apulse for programs that don't support jack. I can quit jack2 and zoom will work with alsa directly (although alsa does not support my HDMI out, so I only have mic) but it won't work when jack2 is running.

Regarding SSO, for me it was Firefox containers blocking me (I think). I did not have the "zoom domain" as "always open in work container", however I had our company SSO login page on that list. So by jumping from a "no container" to my work container during log in, I think the app opening feature failed.

@malexan I normally use picom so I installed xcompmgr but it's no different. When opening the whiteboard picom gives a bunch of warnings and errors, like "flags cleared on a destroyed window" and "failed to query info". Not sure if that's related.

@caleb, no that's not it. As said, everything was working just a few days ago, but the system update that was performed yesterday obviously broke something, because reverting to a previous system snapshot using Timeshift solved the issue.

@MasterOne I've seen a similar crash not just recently but frequently across many versions in the last few months. The easiest way I found to avoid it is to make sure and enter the meeting ID with no spaces. I found copy and pasting the meeting ID from Zoom emails with their space separated groupings frequently caused crashes, but if I either type in or paste in a meeting ID with no spaces it us more stable.

Another one for me (because I‌ frequently type on a non-English keyboard layout and switch layouts to type digits) is that swapping keyboard layouts using a keyboard shortcut (and the resulting momentary switch of input focus) sometimes crashed the join meeting box too. If I switch to a layout that I can type Arabic numerals first, then hit join and enter the meeting ID it is less likely to crash.

Neither of these things are unique to recent Zoom versions. I find the zoom-system-qt package works better and crashes less frequently, but both are deeply troublesome. The upstream software quality is just abysmal and there isn't a lot the Arch packaging can do to fix it.

A system update performed on one of my laptops yesterday causes Zoom to crash after the Meeting ID and Passcode has been entered. Anyone else experiencing such a problem?

P.S. Sorry for being vague with no exact error diagnoses, but the problem was discovered yesterday at the beginning of a Zoom meeting and I had to get it going quickly again, so I just used Timeshift to revert to an earlier snapshot. I'm using GNOME on that laptop, if that matters.

@rgambord, do you use alsa stand alone without pulse, or do you use pulse. It sounds you're using the former. Alsa stand alone without pulse works fine, and there's really no much to do on such a system. Just make sure your system audio works fine before using zoom, perhaps adjusting its configuration with alsactl. The Arch wiki for alsa is good: "https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Advanced_Linux_Sound_Architecture". There can be some audio channels muted, and then you have to unmute them. Make sure to review capture as well, so you can set things up for the mic. To test sound, prior to using zoom, aplay can help, and to test the mic, then arecord can help, but you can find that on the wiki. If sounds works fine with alsa, then zoom should work great with no particular settings for it...

I tried @hv15's fix with JACK and alsa-plugins. No luck. Neither does aplay work.

I noticed many zoom-related processes running in the background after zoom closes, can anyone confirm?