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:

Linux install script:

https://codeberg.org/governorkeagan/hubstaff-linux

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

11 comments

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.
- 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.
  
  If the tracking software is open source what is stopping employees from changing source code to their advantage ?
  
  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

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.

For screenshots Spectacle supports Wayland. Perhaps you could create a script to trigger it when certain conditions are met to get a similar effect.
- I tried contacting support to get it fixed from their side (haven't followed up recently). The issue they noted from my logs was the following:
  2024-02-29 02:00:12.809995 [AUDIT] [main] ActivityTracker.cpp:923 (START_IGNORED) Unable to start tracking project(2730068) due to Screenshots data consent/permission.
  In the app, you need to enable permission for tracking (see screenshot). For some reason, this permission isn't granted "correctly" on Wayland which means it won't let me track time. At least that's how I understand it.

11 comments