Well-known chatterbox Nate Drake walks newcomers to Linux through the many excellent videoconferencing options on your Linux system.

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Nate Drake is a tech journalist specialising in cybersecurity. He placed his first Linux video call via Skype in 2007 to ask his girlfriend to buy him some Smarties.

If you’re new to Linux it’s easy to fall for the stories peddled online that the OS is terrible for more advanced activities such as gaming and videoconferencing and you should stick to Windows or Mac OS.

Still, the Linux desktop’s market share has climbed to over 4% in 2024 and it seems developers are paying attention. A number of popular video-calling applications, such as Skype, Zoom and Signal, offer Linux versions. If you’re conscientious about privacy, there are also open source, encrypted video-calling options like Jitsi.

In this guide, we explore how to get started with videoconferencing in Linux, as well as how to set up some of the more popular video-calling apps.

Testing your webcam

Webcam support in Linux is mostly provided by the UVC driver. This is designed to make sure webcams ‘just work’ in the same way as when you connect different types of USB drives.

UVC compliant peripherals like webcams only need this driver to work out of the box. In an ideal world, this should be the case for your integrated/USB webcam.

The best way to test this is to use a video camera app. If you’re using the most recent version of Ubuntu LTS, the traditional program Cheese has been replaced with the Gnome app Snapshot. You can reinstall Cheese, however, by opening a terminal and running: $ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get install cheese

If you don’t feel comfortable with the command line just yet, you can also search for Cheese in the App Center, then hit Install to begin setup.

Once the app launches, you should see a live feed of your own face staring back at you. If this is not the case, hit the three lines at the top-right and choose Preferences. From here, choose the Webcam tab and find the Device field. You can use the drop-down menu to check your webcam has been correctly selected.

If your webcam isn’t recognised, first double-check that the issue isn’t related to Cheese by trying an alternative app. Search the App Center for Guvcview, which, like Cheese, can view and record video from UVC-compatible devices. Click Install to download. Alternatively, fire up a terminal once again and run: $ sudo apt-get guvcview Launch the app to try to detect your video device.

The Skype web interface (pictured here running in Firefox) is optimised for running in Chromium-based browsers. We recommend using Chromium itself.

Webcam woes

Assuming your chosen webcam is not recognised by Linux, you have two choices. The first involves downloading the source code for the UVC driver for your version of the Linux kernel, then modifying it to work with your webcam. This is an involved process and doesn’t always work. You can find further help with this in the community support forums for your distro. Or you can invest in a UVC-compatible webcam. These days retailers are aware of Linux users, so you can search sites like Amazon to find a Linux webcam.