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Apparently it FORCES you to have BOTH a microphone and a camera enabled and accessible to the site. It actually refused to run on my desktop computer because it doesn’t have a camera, had to pull out my laptop which made me late for the meeting.
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Apparently it ALWAYS DEFAULTS to having both the camera and microphone on the instant you connect to the call, accessible by all other participants. With no warning before you join the call.
Fuck that shit. At least Zoom, as much as I also hate it, lets you connect with no camera and/or microphone (you can just use the chat), shows you a preview of your camera before you join and lets you disable it right then and there, and makes sharing your audio an explicit action for every meeting.
That post recommends using the v4l2loopback kernel module, which is what is most often used on Linux for making a virtual camera device, but there is also another out-of-tree module called akvcam which apparently creates a more convincing fake camera. So if you ever find that zoom/facebook/whatever detects and blocks your v4l2loopback camera, you could try that instead.
(I found it via Linux-Fake-Background-Webcam, which is a background replacement tool that can use either of v4l2loopback or akvcam.)