Flameshot

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Overall sentiment

  • Many commenters call Flameshot their primary or “must-have” screenshot tool, often used daily and wired to hotkeys.
  • Praised for powerful controls, precise cropping with magnifier, quick annotations, and cross-platform availability.
  • Some say it was good enough that they stopped looking for alternatives after trying several tools.

Wayland, multi-monitor & scaling issues

  • Major recurring complaint: unreliable behavior on Wayland, especially with Sway and multi-monitor setups (different sizes/resolutions).
  • Reports of broken clipboard/save behavior, derotated monitors, “weird” multi-monitor glitches, and fractional scaling issues.
  • Others say it works “fine” on Wayland for them, suggesting compositor- and setup-specific variability.
  • A large recent PR closing many issues gives some hope that longstanding bugs will be addressed.

Platform-specific experiences

  • Works best on Linux X11 and Windows according to several users; Wayland and macOS are described as less smooth or buggy.
  • Some Mac users report gray screens, awkward desktop switching, or UI quirks; others still consider it their go-to on macOS.
  • On KDE/Wayland, some report flawless experience, others hit multi-monitor bugs, again highlighting compositor differences.

Features, workflows & integrations

  • Common workflows: binding to PrintScreen / Win+Shift+S equivalents, piping to S3 or custom uploaders, integrating with window managers, hammerspoon, Raycast, and PowerToys.
  • Used for documentation, bug reports (JIRA), OCR pipelines (via tesseract), numbered callouts, and snarky annotations.
  • Requests for improvements include pen smoothing, better text-box behavior, and rectangle resizing.

Alternatives & comparisons

  • KDE Spectacle receives strong praise for UX, speed (with workarounds), and Wayland video capture.
  • Other mentioned tools: Shottr, Shutter (powerful but Perl-heavy and hard to evolve), ksnip, ShareX (Windows), Lightshot, grim+slurp+satty scripts, and macOS/Windows built-in tools.
  • Some prefer closed-source Shottr or CleanShot on macOS; others reject non–open source tools.

HDR and image quality

  • Flameshot (like most screenshot tools) doesn’t capture HDR; this is a blocker for some.
  • Discussion notes that HDR support on Linux is still maturing; KDE Plasma and GNOME have improving but not universal HDR pipelines.
  • Built-in tools on newer macOS and Windows 11 snipping/Xbox Game Bar can capture HDR, often via JXR.