What happened?
When you mute your microphone in software at the operating system level (ex: mute it in GNOME Shell / GNOME Settings), and try to enter a Jitsi room, on the Electron app or Chromium you get this nice little warning that the microphone is muted outside of the browser (even if the browser itself has authorized microphone permissions for the Jitsi website and Jitsi itself is unmuted), with the white message there:
However, this message does not appear when you are inside the conferencing room, so there is no visual reminder indication that you may have muted your system microphone (I have it bound to a global keyboard shortcut) at runtime.
Another side-effect of not detecting that during a meeting is that Jitsi keeps wasting CPU processing audio even if the OS' microphone is muted (and therefore it's processing silence), as long as Jitsi's microphone toggle button is not set to muted. In my case, I have noticed a significant difference in CPU usage between Jitsi's muted (3.5% CPU usage) and unmuted (9% CPU usage) button state, so it would be much nicer if it could also save power when the browser tells it that the microphone is muted at the operating system level, i.e. not processing silent audio.
Platform
Browser / app / sdk version
2026.4.0 (Electron app) / Chromium 146.0.7680.177
I am running GNOME 49.5's Wayland session on open source AMD graphics on Fedora 43.
What happened?
When you mute your microphone in software at the operating system level (ex: mute it in GNOME Shell / GNOME Settings), and try to enter a Jitsi room, on the Electron app or Chromium you get this nice little warning that the microphone is muted outside of the browser (even if the browser itself has authorized microphone permissions for the Jitsi website and Jitsi itself is unmuted), with the white message there:
However, this message does not appear when you are inside the conferencing room, so there is no visual reminder indication that you may have muted your system microphone (I have it bound to a global keyboard shortcut) at runtime.
Another side-effect of not detecting that during a meeting is that Jitsi keeps wasting CPU processing audio even if the OS' microphone is muted (and therefore it's processing silence), as long as Jitsi's microphone toggle button is not set to muted. In my case, I have noticed a significant difference in CPU usage between Jitsi's muted (3.5% CPU usage) and unmuted (9% CPU usage) button state, so it would be much nicer if it could also save power when the browser tells it that the microphone is muted at the operating system level, i.e. not processing silent audio.
Platform
Browser / app / sdk version
2026.4.0 (Electron app) / Chromium 146.0.7680.177
I am running GNOME 49.5's Wayland session on open source AMD graphics on Fedora 43.