Flameshot Stopped Working

Logged on: 2026-06-20

Problem

I rely on flameshot daily. So far as I can tell, there simply is no better tool to annotate a snippet of my screen and copy the image to my clipboard. Imagine my shock and frustration then when I updated my system and flameshot started doing this:

Solution

Fortunately I was able to find the solution quickly. To solve the problem, I updated ~/.config/flameshot/flameshot.ini and added this line under [General]:

flameshot.ini
useX11LegacyScreenshot=true

Analysis

I found this GitHub thread in which it’s mentioned that NixOS users using X11 environments are affected by this issue. I actually had thought the laptop I’m using was setup with Wayland but a quick check in the terminal emulator revealed otherwise:

$ echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE
x11

Well, that explains why Flameshot even worked at all - I’ve had really bad luck getting it to work under Wayland. However, this issue is telling; if Flameshot is using the XDG Desktop Portal as a default - seemingly expecting this to be available out of the box - modern environments with Wayland are likely being prioritized and Flameshot likely works fine in Wayland now. I can probably move away from X11 on my next install, finally.