Apropos of nothing, but as someone who habitually uses the old desktop GNOME Screenshot app on Ubuntu, I wanted to pass on word that it doesn’t work in Ubuntu 25.10 with GNOME 491 — like, at all.

It’s neither bug nor a regression (at least, inadvertently so) but intentional.

GNOME Shell has a built-in screenshot feature, and the old app is no longer maintained

GNOME revoked the app’s access to the private screen capture API in GNOME 49, noting there is “no good reason anymore for treating it differently than other 3rd-party screenshot tools”2.

That make sense: GNOME Shell has a built-in, interactive screenshot and screen recording feature, activated through a Quick Settings button or pressing print screen.

The GNOME Screenshot app is deprecated, unmaintained and not been part of the core GNOME software set since 2021 – and thus not updated to use an alternative (supported) method like portals, which other Wayland-friendly screenshot tools use.

With no ability to capture screen contents, it simply doesn’t work.

That isn’t a major issue of itself since there other apps do work, as well as GNOME’s built-in screenshot feature, but as GNOME Screenshot is available to install in Ubuntu 25.10 from the repos, there’s a chance folks will install it, see the error, and wonder why — as I did!

If you install the gnome-screenshot tool in Ubuntu 25.10 and try to take a screenshot using its GUI or CLI modes, an unable to capture a screenshot, all possible methods failed error dialog is shown.

Being a blogger writing about Linux apps, I have continued to use GNOME Screenshot long upstream moved on from it because of one feature that the GNOME Shell screen grab tool doesn’t offer: a configurable delay timer.

Technically, the GNOME Shell screenshot tool does have a delay feature: it captures the screenshot as soon as you press the print screen button, not after you click the big red capture button in the on-screen interactive UI.

But it’s not configurable, and as someone who often needs to ‘stage’ a screenshot (a specific menu, a tooltip, etc), a configurable delay I can set without needing to press keyboard buttons is handy.

There are other features beyond capture delay that the old app offers, including a CLI, the ability to capture to the clipboard only, and set the location where screen grabs are saved. GNOME Shell’s built-in tool doesn’t offer those — yet, at least; it might add them.

As someone who has been using the standalone app for decades (of late, out of familiarity more than anything) I was thrown by the error screen. I figured I’d pass on word lest anyone else end up confused by fact it doesn’t work.

I must stress that this change only affects the old gnome-screenshot app in Ubuntu 25.10 with GNOME 49 under Wayland. The app may/will still work in other desktop environments using different display servers. If you use this happily elsewhere, fret not!

  1. Under Wayland. GNOME 49 no longer officially supports Xorg/X11 sessions, though one can be re-enabled by packagers who build the relevant GNOME components from source. ↩︎
  2. When GNOME say it should’t be ‘treated differently’ to 3rd party apps they mean it should use the same official portals or (where applicable) public APIs. It’s unlikely GNOME will be going out of its way to do that, so… Over to the community? ↩︎