The latest version of the GNOME Network Displays app lets you stream your desktop to a wireless display using the Chromecast and Miracast over Infrastructure (MICE) protocols.

Both features had been in development for a while and were long-standing requests from many in the Linux community. To see both land in a the recent release of GNOME Network Displays 0.91 is great, and makes working with wireless displays much easier.

You can use GNOME Network Displays to mirror your screen or create a virtual screen.

MICE support has been tested to stream a GNOME desktop to an LG WebOS smart TV through ethernet and Wi-Fi over LAN rather than WiFi Direct. MICE works better with older wireless hardware and, as it uses existing connections, speeds up the time to stream and offers a more stable stream.

Miracast over Infrastructure is not considered a replacement for regular Miracast but rather a way to bring the tech to people needing to use the feature on locked-down/enterprise networks.

Chromecast support? That won’t need much introduction! These HDMI dongles from Google are fairly ubiquitous by now, and the tech that powers them is even being integrated directly into TVs, monitors, and set top boxes from other OEMs.

Although both protocols serve differing needs they both do the same thing: connect to a remote display in a user friendly, low-friction way.

Additionally, GNOME Network Displays has now been ported to GTK4, uses libportal to acquire screencast portals, and dedupes sinks based on IP and P2P MAC instead of name, among other changes.

I do recall plans to make it possible to ‘cast’ your screen from the Quick Settings menu in GNOME Shell. That work wasn’t directly tied to the GNOME Network Displays app as such but an adjacent effort to leverage these new capabilities with GNOME Settings. That work could still materialise in the near future.

If you want to try this out you can – and you don’t need anything other than a compatible display/dongle and the GNOME Network Displays v0.91 or later app.

You can install the latest version of the app from Flathub, or if you’re running the Ubuntu 24.04 daily builds install it from straight from the repos using apt. If you encounter an app crash when connecting to a Chromecast you need to install gstreamer1-plugins-ugly.

The Ubuntu package present in Noble includes a bonus: a “cherry-pick patch to allow casting a single window”. This could be especially useful, depending on your setup and needs.