[HN Gopher] Unofficial Microsoft Teams client for Linux
___________________________________________________________________
Unofficial Microsoft Teams client for Linux
Author : basemi
Score : 260 points
Date : 2025-11-04 07:41 UTC (11 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| ranger_danger wrote:
| README looks AI-generated, I wonder how much of the entire
| project was made the same way.
| aclindsa wrote:
| I didn't dig too deeply, but saw a commit message written by
| Claude
| worble wrote:
| The CLAUDE.md is a bigger giveaway
| wizzledonker wrote:
| After a cursory glance at commit messages, looks like most of
| it.
|
| Like all AI co-authored code it's a matter of time before this
| becomes unmaintainable and abandoned.
| mrweasel wrote:
| I'm deeply fascinated that people can make this work at all.
| Just yesterday I had a fight with an AI regarding some Python
| code, the stupid thing wouldn't admit it didn't know how to
| use something and just kept spitting out the same lines of
| broken code. Then here is someone writing an entire
| functional Teams client with Claude.
| figmert wrote:
| Usually in those scenarios you stop and do the research
| yourself and correct it. You don't keep asking it. Also
| starting new conversations often help.
| gitmagic wrote:
| > Then here is someone writing an entire functional Teams
| client with Claude.
|
| According to the README it's just a wrapper of the web
| version, with some additional stuff on top.
| neilv wrote:
| Alternative solution: Flee any company that uses Microsoft Teams.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Fine in b2b settings but in some b2c cases (particularly when
| the "b" side is some municipal or governmental entity - those
| LOVE Microsoft products) it's kind of hard to get options.
| stuaxo wrote:
| This sounds wonderful, many of us just need to work somewhere
| and other things are more important than some of their
| unfortunate software choices.
| denimnerd42 wrote:
| I've never used teams, what's bad about it? my newco is moving
| from webex to teams for video but keeping slack. I'm a bit
| worried keeping slack is a short term thing.
| crims0n wrote:
| It is a worse slack client chock-full of Microsoft bloat. My
| company tried to move to it after getting an E5 license and
| the entire technology org screamed bloody murder until they
| reversed course.
|
| IMHO... Slack and Zoom are the best combo. Zoom being
| necessary because for some reason Slack just cannot handle
| meetings well.
| perching_aix wrote:
| I can list off a few issues, but as usual, who and how many
| will share these experiences is a complete toss-up:
|
| - random chunks of chat log can go temporarily missing at
| random when you scroll up. temporarily as in, they'll load on
| another device. on the regular one though, who knows when
| you'll get them back...
|
| - if you manage to call someone the same time they do you,
| all bets are off. got things softlocked more than a few
| times.
|
| - the usual recent Microsoft obsession with (keyboard-focus
| hijacking!) popups is of course also a thing in Teams
|
| - text styling is hell, and sometimes when you click on the
| copy button in code blocks or copy out stuff in general, you
| get html tags polluting your copied data
|
| - chats & group chats vs. team chats is extremely unnecessary
| and cumbersome
|
| - multitenant support does a complete ui reload after which
| you miss notifications from the tenant you switched away from
| (might be different now)
|
| - the localization is funky, just like in all other Microsoft
| products; from the small, like calendars starting on the
| wrong day, to the bigger, where if you ping @everyone in your
| Teams set to your native locale, then on the other side
| people will also see the ping in your native locale. It's
| just like Exchange/Outlook in this regard.
|
| - the audio settings like getting mixed up, especially if you
| happen to disconnect and reconnect your stuff on the regular.
|
| - they seemingly hardcode the URL preview thumbnail logic per
| trusted site, instead of using opengraph. their hardcoded
| integrations are also ignorant of e.g. url encoding and have
| other minor blemishes. I dare you to link the C++ wikipedia
| article to someone.
|
| - profile pics go away sometimes (mine has been missing for
| weeks now, appears everywhere else), and statuses can get
| stuck or be null
|
| These are all ongoing things that persist after years of use.
| Other, more questionable, already solved, or rare / one-off
| qualms would include:
|
| - one time I tried screensharing, and when I clicked the
| button it showed me an emoji picker flyout instead of a share
| options flyout (lol)
|
| - used to crash all the time in Edge of all things (not sure
| about other browsers), fixed since
|
| - screenshare can freeze without you knowing any better
| thanks to the often extremely low framerate.
|
| - slow (might be my terrible workstation)
|
| - happily lies about delivery status and reorders messages
| fragmede wrote:
| Today, Teams decided to update itself _during a video
| call_. It started acting wonky during the call until I
| force quit it, and then when I restarted it, it had a whole
| update procedure that I had to wait for. Meanwhile, I just
| used slack 's video call thing. Luckily, my meeting was
| easily moved over.
| adzm wrote:
| The text copying is pretty much the only remaining issue I
| have with Teams, and it is so infuriating when you
| encounter it.
| usr1106 wrote:
| I only use the PWA. Typing is not keyboard friendly, you need
| to use the mouse for formatting. Some keyboard shortcuts
| exist, but some don't work if you don't have an English
| keyboard.
|
| It cannot keep track of what messages you have read, often
| you need to read the same messages twice. The set of emojis
| is limited (could be deemed a childish problem, but with 100%
| remote team emojis are important to have some fun). The
| layout of threads sucks, sometimes you have only a small side
| panel to work with. When you want to delete old
| notifications, it sometimes just says "Cannot delete".
|
| It't the worst application I have to use at work. As soon as
| I have the possibility I will join a company again hat uses
| Zulip. Unfortunately those are rare.
| Mashimo wrote:
| The only complaints I have is that is slightly sluggish.
| tom_ wrote:
| The last couple of places I worked at used Teams, as did a
| number of the clients. We never found anything much better for
| the video calling aspect, and my understanding is that Teams
| comes for free with all the other Microsoft Shit - so you may
| as well.
|
| I didn't find the chats/discussion UI at all clear initially,
| but once I'd had it explained to me, I could see what was going
| on.
|
| (I do remember it taking a long time to load, and apparently
| using a surprising amount of memory once it was finally done,
| but aside from providing reliable fodder for water cooler
| conversations with other 40+ year old colleagues this never
| actually seemed to cause a problem in practice. At my last
| Teams-using job I would restart my PC no more than once or
| twice a week, something I could let happen in parallel with
| making the cup of tea that I'd always be making at some point
| anyway. And it had 64 GB RAM, which isn't even a lot by today's
| standards, but still Teams didn't actually fill all of it.)
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Zoom, Slack and Google Meet all work as well or better than
| Teams for it's primary purpose: video calls. Teams freezes
| up, consume ALL your resources, going from one call to
| another and it just stops working. The only thing I've used
| that's worse is Chime.
|
| >> I didn't find the chats/discussion UI at all clear
| initially, but once I'd had it explained to me, I could see
| what was going on.
|
| This is an example of how bad it is: you had to have the chat
| UX explained to you. Combined with MS cramming as much crap
| into teams as possible and trying to tie you to their other
| products with integrations that barely or rarely work - and
| the AI features are terrible (and yet another MS AI offering
| called Copilot?). It really is that bad and I'm glad I no
| longer have to use it.
| discordance wrote:
| I keep hearing this on HN, but I never run into these
| issues with Teams. Video calling is fine and chat is ok. We
| generally just use chats instead of channels as that just
| seems like an unnecessary abstraction.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Having org wide joinable channels is useful.
|
| Splitting small group chat across more than a couple of
| chats is insane.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| We use Zoom, Teams and Google at work. depending on the
| client each swears the other never works or is horrible.
|
| I think we can all agree microsoft business video for
| skype or whatever it was called, was at least the worst
| julianz wrote:
| I don't see this behaviour at all, and I live in Teams on
| Windows, web and Android. It has improved over time.
| tom_ wrote:
| I don't disagree about the chat UX. The chat vs channel
| distinction was not at all clear when I started using
| Teams, at least not to me, and actually not to any of my
| colleagues either, and it was a large part of why we
| quickly started using Slack at that place. It wasn't until
| I did some work with a client that had long gone full
| Microsoft that I encountered somebody that had an idea of
| what was going on.
|
| (In fact, it's not really that complicated. If you squint
| right, it might even be more useful than what Slack gives
| you! But something about the UI just didn't make it
| remotely obvious.)
|
| Anyway, even if the text chat isn't awesome, for video
| calls, we never had a problem, and it scales pretty well
| with number of participants.
| TheCraiggers wrote:
| The way the job market is right now, I wouldn't flee a company
| running MS-DOS.
| beoberha wrote:
| I'm incredibly biased (I work at Microsoft) but I love Teams.
| It's a great meeting app and a great chat app. It blows my mind
| that there are companies that have totally separate apps for
| each (Zoom/Slack).
| darthcircuit wrote:
| It's more incredible to me that Microsoft has different
| versions of teams that don't work with each other, but are
| named the same thing, and that the home version of teams that
| doesn't work with enterprise teams comes forcibly bundled
| with an pro or enterprise os.
| roygbiv2 wrote:
| It's so fucking bizarre that there are multiple versions of
| the same thing, that are called the same thing but aren't
| the same thing!
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Teams is the only meeting app where I am usually late because
| it doesn't just let me join my meeting. Zoom will never lock
| up letting you join a meeting because someone decided you
| need to reauthenticate Teams regularly.
|
| This would be understandable if it happened quickly but
| normally Teams has a seizure for a minute or two when you try
| to join the call and _then_ you get told to sign in. Whoever
| allowed this behavior to ship should be fired out a cannon...
| when I click join a call, absolutely nothing should stop me
| from joining a call.
|
| In fairness this might not be explicitly Teams' fault. It's
| built on top of a terrible authentication platform which also
| seems to be down at least four or five days a year. 365 is
| one of those things that could not exist if not for the
| incredible monopoly Microsoft has over Excel.
| adzm wrote:
| It's gotten so much better recently, and I used to be a Teams
| hater.
| 65 wrote:
| I would prefer to have a job that pays me money than to not
| have to use Teams.
| lousken wrote:
| If only they fixed screen sharing on firefox in the official web
| version...
| lillesvin wrote:
| I use screen sharing from the official web client in Firefox on
| both Debian and Fedora without any issues. What issue(s) do you
| encounter?
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| I have one thats purveying over apparently linux, mac,
| chrome, firefox... when you screenshare on multiple monitors
| (or workspaces) the screen stops updating.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| My screen share went from fine to low resolution all the
| time. Really annoying.
| tetris11 wrote:
| works fine for me
| quasigod wrote:
| Pretty sure any screen sharing from a browser app would use the
| browsers screen capture api, which should just use your
| desktops screen sharing portal if on Wayland. Maybe make sure
| you have the desktop portal for your DE installed.
| drdaeman wrote:
| Screen sharing? Hold on, those extra-advanced features could
| wait. Microsoft should focus first on message delivery
| (notifications may be delayed for hours), showing media in
| chats (picture and videos fail to show most of the time) and
| just opening conversations correctly from notifications
| (message from a person opens a group chat, sometimes that forks
| a conversation, leading to loss of history). That's the very
| basics for every messaging app, and even those don't work
| properly.
|
| (This is about official Windows and iOS Teams apps. I haven't
| yet tried any GNU/Linux options.)
| chrneu wrote:
| lol android/windows user here. all those bugs are so common,
| it's hilarious how bad teams is.
| kyriakos wrote:
| Most annoying bug I experience is occasionally all messages I
| send not being delivered silently. You only realize it after
| a long while when no one seems to react to anything you say.
| Open in another device and you can't see your own messages.
| They are not delayed they just never get delivered. Such an
| unreliable tool being used in a professional environment.
| teo_zero wrote:
| If we're listing Team's idiosyncrasies, when you're chatting
| with exactly one person in a group chat after all the others
| have left, their name becomes "just me". You won't ever see
| their real name again.
| netsharc wrote:
| First rule of Fight Chat: you do not talk about Fight Chat.
|
| The idea of Fight Club but it's a bunch of corporate
| zombies arguing in a chat room amuses me.
|
| Wait a minute...
| dxxvi wrote:
| I agree. Screen sharing in Teams used to work in Firefox but
| not in the current version (144). It works in Chrome though.
| badthingfactory wrote:
| I avoid Teams as much as possible, but when I have to join a
| Teams meeting the PWA works fine.
| linuxdaemon wrote:
| I've been using this unofficial client for years, so it's been
| a while since I tried the PWA version. In my use, this client
| brings 2 things missing from PWA: notification count in the
| tray area, and respecting default browser for opening links.
|
| I thought I could get by without a tray icon, but it turned out
| to be too cumbersome to have to explicitly open the window and
| make sure no one messaged me while I was at lunch, or whatever.
|
| I use firefox for my main browser; and teams doesn't work great
| there. So I have to use Edge or Chrome. But then, when someone
| sends a link in Teams, it opens in that browser. This
| unofficial client acts like an actual standalone app and opens
| links in my default browser. Now if they sent a link that lands
| on some other office365 thing, there is about a 15% chance that
| just won't work ;)
|
| But yeah, if you are able to mostly avoid this POS, then those
| 2 things likely don't matter and PWA is fine.
| vee-kay wrote:
| There's an open-source Chrome extension (also works for
| Chrome OS) to show Notification Badges for MS Teams PWA
| (Progressive Web Apps):
|
| https://github.com/devoldoak/msteams-notification-badges
|
| For notifications, the Administrator needs to enable the
| NotificationsAllowedForURLs policy, which automatically
| allows notifications for Teams on the web:
|
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-
| progr...
| bigbuppo wrote:
| Why would you do this? What purpose does this serve other than to
| create additional misery and suffering in this world?
| scblock wrote:
| Because your company is all in on teams but you prefer to use
| linux when possible. It gets the job done for chat and calls.
| jama211 wrote:
| I'm sure if you think about it for more than 30 seconds you'll
| figure it out
| hdgvhicv wrote:
| I've used the teams client in Ubuntu for years. It's a pain when
| multitasking (text chat with another group then try to find your
| wayback to the existing video conference) but functions well
| enough
| le-mark wrote:
| I had this happen a few times with the official client on
| Ubuntu back in 2020 or so: My laptop cpu and fan would go crazy
| and after a while I ran out disk space. I found a .so in the
| teams install directory was several hundred gigabytes. So I'd
| delete teams and reinstall. Then it would happen again a few
| months later. I actually caught it in progress inflating the
| same .so. I ended up uninstalling it permanently, luckily the
| team I was in didn't depend on it, it was mostly hr that
| required it.
|
| Appears they retired the linux version a while ago.
| jacquesm wrote:
| What on earth was in that file?
| ArnoVW wrote:
| My guess: an entire VM wrapped in a binary
| 65 wrote:
| My Teams is completely broken on MacOS. Yes I tried uninstalling
| and re-installing multiple times. Nothing works. So I've resorted
| to using the very laggy Teams web app.
|
| What good has Microsoft done for the world other than digital
| pain and suffering?
| tomrod wrote:
| Clear the teams cache, it can persist after uninstall.
| ohm wrote:
| Use this app to uninstall it
| https://freemacsoft.net/appcleaner/ it should remove all traces
| of the app from computer
| 65 wrote:
| I should complain on Hacker News more often. That worked!
| Finally. Thank you!
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > What good has Microsoft done for the world other than digital
| pain and suffering?
|
| Minesweeper was kinda fun.
| SG- wrote:
| growing up as a Mac user in the 80s and 90s I always found it
| a really dumb game.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I was damning with faint praise.
| mberning wrote:
| I am always amazed at how people can put so much effort into
| something that will very likely be killed or made impossible by
| the vendor. Reminds me of that iMessage client for android. It
| lasted what, a couple weeks of cat and mouse?
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Beeper mini.
| gerdesj wrote:
| Teams will always work in a browser, so make hay whilst the sun
| shines.
|
| Sadly bits fall off depending on which browser you use. Firefox
| seems to have fallen out of favour and can no longer share.
| Chromium efforts still seem to work OK. I have sometimes found
| that faking my browser agent helps with stability ... which is
| sad and possibly rather disingenuous.
|
| I must get around to spinning up a Jitsi jobbie. BBB should be
| my favourite but is a non starter due to elderly software in
| the stack. I need to take another look at all this stuff.
| SG- wrote:
| I mean that's like real life too right? you'll die eventually
| so might as well give up? or you might get hit by a car
| tomorrow too so yeah don't bother with anything.
|
| Also lets forget the fact that some people actually like coding
| or wanted a fun weekend project.
| EionRobb wrote:
| I enjoy the cat-and-mouse!
|
| I've been writing the Teams plugin for Pidgin for the past few
| years and its great to be able to give users the kind of
| features or privacy options that you'd never get from official
| clients, while learning lots of fun ways (ab)using web tech to
| solve problems.
|
| Like how in Teams, it does a "reverse webhook" to push presence
| notifications to a web client acting as a server over a
| websocket
| 7952 wrote:
| No idea if it applies here. But many people outside of tech
| start crafty projects as a way of regaining some control from
| stress and pressure. Its fun, rewarding and something you can
| do in a sea of things you can't.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| Teams itself can barely keep up with its own features, I wonder
| how an unofficial client would.
|
| Also, what's driving the need? I've taken a peek under the hood,
| it's just an electron app. It's not closed source (not opensource
| either, due to licensing) as far as I could tell aside from
| libraries that aren't part of it's app logic
| (graphics,audio,etc..). And there are webhooks for bot authoring.
|
| I'm just scared it would have issues integrating with onedrive or
| some other MS app at the worst moment.
| nmstoker wrote:
| It's wrapping the web version of Teams, so presumably there are
| few of the issues you suggest because most of the functionality
| comes from the page and it's just changes that impact the
| smaller number of Linux integrations that need attention.
| mastazi wrote:
| I've been using this for a long time and it works better than the
| official client (which I use on another computer) because it has
| less bugs.
|
| For example the official client has a bug where it will open
| chats in a separate window even when the user did not intend to
| (has to do with the first click being ignored while Teams it's
| out of focus, and the second click being interpreted as a double
| click). The unofficial Teams for Linux doesn't have this problem.
| happymellon wrote:
| I encounter this on Mac most days as well.
|
| Teams is the pinnacle of bad Microsoft design forced on to
| everyone, even if they don't use Windows.
|
| > But, but, but, what features is it missing?
|
| Is always the response from Microsoft apologists. Why do I have
| to have different ways of calling depending on whether its a
| group or a chat? And chat calls don't alert the other person
| that you are even calling them? What a pile of shit. I know
| Slack also introduced shit huddles, because why not break
| something that already works, but that doesn't mean you _have_
| to copy them.
|
| It's not always missing features, its that the UI is a series
| of papercuts.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Hmm. A bit of weird anecdata; I'm a faculty point of contact for
| tech issues at my very (but not overly) microsofty university and
| also a very longtime Linux user.
|
| But I seem to have a _better_ time of things in this realm than
| MANY of my Windows /Mac colleagues re Outlook, Teams, etc
| precisely because I'm always relegated to the Web/PWA stuff. They
| often literally seem to have more issues than me.
| DANmode wrote:
| The Web never goes out of style!
| gtirloni wrote:
| Must be nice to be Teams' product manager and see this. /s
| DANmode wrote:
| You think their _boss_ reads HN?!
| rand17 wrote:
| Copilot has neither eyes, nor feelings.
| self_awareness wrote:
| You wrongly assume that they care.
| scblock wrote:
| I use this a lot and it works well.
| wanderingmind wrote:
| Teams is a must if you are a professional in Australia. However,
| I love my Debian+ i3 too much to give it up. Using it through
| chrome is not easy especially to chat. So, I install it as
| appomage through appman and it works beautifully well that I can
| automatically update as well.
| smitty1e wrote:
| Installed this under Pop!_OS on the new System76 laptop and it
| seems to be working fine.
|
| If I have to use Teams, at least its not under 'Doze.
| dominiwe wrote:
| I recently had a desire to enable PiP and video controls in
| teams.
|
| I was able to contribute it to this project which was a genuinely
| good and smooth process.
|
| If you start the app with '--videoMenu' new menu options to
| enable/control this appear.
| mrintegrity wrote:
| You can also try this user script which I am using in Firefox
| https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/552472-allow-pip-in-teams-...
|
| It works great
| hosteur wrote:
| Please make an unofficial client for windows too. The official
| one sucks so much it is hard to even describe.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It's effectively malware.
| jonathanlydall wrote:
| I use Teams on Windows extensively at work (for chats, calls,
| meetings, screen sharing). And I have zero issues with it.
|
| It's been really solid for me since that major overhaul they
| did a couple of years back.
|
| Not sure what issues you have, but I wonder if perhaps that us
| NOT running 3rd party security products is a factor (we only
| run Windows Defender).
| rf15 wrote:
| I'm at the absolute opposite end: Teams was Good Enough when
| it launched, but declined ever since: you can no longer
| fullscreen screen share, fat empty margins everywhere in the
| UI and it nags you about addons and AI stuff.
| varispeed wrote:
| "Works for me, so it must for everyone else"
| jonathanlydall wrote:
| Who are you quoting?
|
| If you want to paraphrase my reply it would be more like:
|
| "It works for some people, it doesn't work for some people,
| what might be different between those groups of people?"
| hvea wrote:
| perception and expectations play a big role. different
| users have varying sensitivity to latency and people's
| standards for software performance can differ based on
| what they're accustomed to.
| Aaargh20318 wrote:
| Apart from it being slow, a memory hog and having a shitty
| web-based UI that feels out of place regardless of what OS
| you're using. It's missing basic features.
|
| One example is the inability to share only part of your
| screen. This is essential if you're working on a large,
| ultra-wide monitor. There's been a feature request for this
| on Microsofts feedback site for _years_.
|
| Also, how embarrassing is it that the biggest software
| company in the world is not able to make a decent native app
| and has to resort to this html-app nonsense.
| ajryan wrote:
| I use this - pain in the ass but it works.
| https://github.com/tom-englert/RegionToShare
| Aaargh20318 wrote:
| Doesn't support macOS unfortunately
| sigseg1v wrote:
| I'm using teams at work and it's a laggy buggy mess, even
| with fairly beefy machines (eg. 64GB RAM, nvme ssd,
| workstation gpu). By this I mean when you click on a button
| or hover over something on the UI there is frequently more
| than 5 seconds for it to respond (eg. stuff like hovering
| over a button, it should show a hover state, but that won't
| appear unless you park the mouse over it for several
| seconds).
|
| We have 5-6 different "endpoint protection" and security
| related pieces of software running on our machines at all
| times. We also have enterprise SSO via SAML2 which is
| constantly logging us out, saying we aren't logged in, re-
| prompting over and over to enrol the machine into some
| management policy which then hangs the program if you click
| yes, and makes you re-authenticate (eg redo login and MFA) if
| you click no.
|
| It frequently just hangs when you click join on a call.
| Sometimes when you are talking it stops responding but other
| people can still hear and see you, which is annoying because
| if you un-mute or take over the screen in a large company
| meeting, but then get stuck with mic on or presenting,
| everyone can awkwardly keep watching you while you can't stop
| doing either of those for 45-60 seconds.
|
| Many of these problems are probably just due to the machines
| being hampered by huge amounts of
| instrumentation/monitoring/interception, but teams is much
| worse than other electron apps. For example, Slack and vscode
| do not exhibit these problems on the same machine.
| ToValueFunfetti wrote:
| Screensharing on a browser and trying to change tabs is a
| constant frustration; you have to wait for that overlay to
| get into the moveable state. Sometimes I have to switch
| between chats several times to get it to acknowledge that
| I've seen that latest message. When you add a code block at
| the end of your message, it's a toss-up whether you can type
| outside of it afterwards with the right or down arrow-key. If
| you can't and you need to, you just have to start over
| AFAICT. Making the codeblocks in the first place is usually a
| hassle even though parsing markdown is a solved problem. It
| has a lot of redundancy with Outlook and I often need to
| clear notifications from both. Search is unreliable.
| Sometimes I open an active conversation and it decides to
| scroll me back a month.
|
| That covers what I'll encounter in a typical week. There are
| one-offs as well. It's not the worst software I work with,
| but talking to my team should really be zero friction.
| Hasnep wrote:
| Could try running teams-for-linux in WSL2 on Windows?
| alentred wrote:
| Haha, do you mean unofficial Teams client, or an unofficial UI
| for Windows itself? The latter is an interesting idea.
| snthd wrote:
| Despite the title, there's a windows build:
|
| https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux/releases
| jacquesm wrote:
| The official client is absolutely terrible. But, I've found a
| much better solution: I tell all my customers Microsoft Teams
| doesn't work for us and they'll have to pick something else.
|
| Kudos for at least trying to address this, MS should hang their
| head in shame, this is not the hardest problem to solve these
| days. If we could do it in 1995 they should be able to do it 30
| years later.
| Yumako wrote:
| Some of my coworkers connect every day to our calls with Linux
| machines.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, so? Some people win the lottery _every month_. But I don
| 't play the lottery, so I can't win. But I also don't lose.
| Tor3 wrote:
| They almost certainly do via the web interface, as I do (and
| lots of others). It works in general, though for some reason
| Teams via a web browser will often have problems seeing the
| microphone, or getting sound, even though every other web
| page using mic/speaker will work. And some other issues, like
| not showing a shared screen without first going to chats and
| then re-expanding the shared screen. When aware of all this
| it generally works ok.
|
| The actual MS client for Linux is, as far as I know, non-
| existing now. Or at least not updated. It was anyway always
| completely useless for several reasons, in particular that it
| always stayed at 100% CPU.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| My Teams client for Linux is MS Edge for Linux with the web
| app, works pretty well except for slow navigation. File
| uploads, audio and video all work. Even screen and window
| sharing on Wayland. The desktop is KDE, so it provides the
| XDG portals and the compositor. Pipewire does audio and
| maybe video routing.
| prmoustache wrote:
| > They almost certainly do via the web interface, as I do
| (and lots of others). It works in general, though for some
| reason Teams via a web browser will often have problems
| seeing the microphone, or getting sound, even though every
| other web page using mic/speaker will work.
|
| Same happens on the official app on windows 11 so the issue
| is not linux specific.
| WD-42 wrote:
| The saddest part is that they copy and pasted Skype, which was
| a decent program at the time.
|
| If you open pamixer and look at applications using audio it
| still shows up as Skype there. At least as of a few years ago.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| Some of the audio stack is probably still from Skype.
| nolok wrote:
| Then again, what they did to Skype is a study case in how to
| destroy a platform users loved.
| jval43 wrote:
| In the Microsoft world, before Teams they had Skype for
| Business, aka MS Lync with a slapped on Skype logo. Complete
| dumpsterfire.
|
| The regular Skype was much better and also ran on Linux, but
| I've come to think Microsoft was only ever interested in
| buying the name.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Teams doesn't work much better on Mac. It's easily the worst
| program I have to use.
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| Haha, a few years back my wife got an M1 Air. It was amazing,
| for her regular work she charged it twice a week and was on
| battery almost always.
|
| Then one day the company switched from zoom to teams. She now
| had to be plugged in constantly.
| alentred wrote:
| Same experience, Mac and iPhone. What is also amazing is
| how much collateral damage it creates: the Microsoft
| Virtual Audio devices that it switches my macOS to, the
| calls that cannot be ended on my iPhone when the app hangs,
| etc. They somehow succeed breaking all the stuff around to.
| necovek wrote:
| I thought it was due to Mac not being their native platform,
| and then I tried Windows, and it's as crappy there as it is
| on a Mac.
|
| Microsoft does not do web-based and distributed end-user
| software well. All sorts of organizational dysfunction leaks
| in the implementation (it's obvious one team was in charge of
| "grouping", and another is in charge of "channels", and no
| connection to any of the Teams calls for a group which and
| god-forbid Outlook). They are in dire need of some "inverse
| Conway maneuvering", but with a behemoth like MS, it's
| probably a mindset shift that's impossible to get through for
| any of the projects they are building today.
|
| If at least they were still focused on doing good desktop
| software, I'd give them a pass, but they are increasingly
| introducing the same problems in the desktop software they
| build too.
|
| However, I wonder even more what's wrong with my organization
| to keep using such subpar tools for years now :(
| jstanley wrote:
| I used Teams in Firefox on Linux and didn't have any issues
| with it, other than it being generally slow and bad.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| The web-based one works perfectly on Linux. If anything it's
| better than the native Windows app.
|
| Office 365 actually works better in Firefox in Linux than any
| other browser in Windows. It's like they've kind of given up on
| the whole OS thing, and have just decided to go with Linux.
| aorth wrote:
| True! I've been doing this for years on Linux. I use a
| dedicated Chromium instance in app mode:
| /usr/bin/chromium --ozone-platform=wayland --enable-features=
| UseOzonePlatform,WaylandWindowDecorations,WebRTCPipeWireCaptu
| rer --user-data-dir=/home/myuser/.config/chromium-ilri
| --app=https://teams.microsoft.com
|
| Works incredibly well (put this in a `.desktop` file with
| `Exec=` and you can launch it via your desktop's launcher).
| Some of the settings may not be needed anymore, as Chromium
| has come a long way in terms of Wayland support. I use
| Firefox for everything else, but haven't tried Teams there.
| cromka wrote:
| Would be great if it was also possible to have it open the
| Team URIs in that App Mode instance instead of the browser
| itself -- I assume it does not.
| homebrewer wrote:
| What kind of URLs does it use? If it's anything with a
| unique prefix (like Telegram's tg://), you can add it to
| the desktop file: MimeType=x-scheme-
| handler/foobar;
|
| and run `update-mime-database`.
|
| If not, I would write a shell wrapper and set it as the
| default browser; something to the effect of:
| #!/usr/bin/bash set -eu for arg in "$@"; do
| if [[ $arg == *whatever-url-teams-uses.com* ]]; then
| exec gtk-launch teams "$@" fi done
| exec gtk-launch firefox "$@"
|
| (gtk-launch uses flags from the .desktop file so you
| don't have to repeat them)
| snickerer wrote:
| The only thing that does not work for me with Teams as
| chromium 'app' is the screen sharing (on Wayland). Does
| your --enable-features fix this?
| E39M5S62 wrote:
| Which compositor/environment? Starting the correct xdg
| portal helped me when I ran Sway.
| dfc wrote:
| You need xdg-desktop-portal . Its probably automatic in
| some environments but with sway I have to set it up
| manually. Its one of those annoying things I forget about
| whenever I set up a new machine.
|
| https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_Desktop_Portal
| b3nji wrote:
| Works for me, using Fedora with Plasma. Just fire it up
| in Brave, and install it as a PWA.
|
| The one thing that bothers me is it can't tell if I'm at
| my machine when I'm not actively using it. People keep
| thinging I've bugered off from my desk.
| MrDrMcCoy wrote:
| Screen sharing from the browser usually works for me, but
| if ever it doesn't, as a workaround you can use OBS with
| a virtual webcam to share windows and screens as an
| overlay to the webcam stream. It's very easy.
| Too wrote:
| If by perfect you mean that you can't have two chats open
| next to each other and toggling between chats is slow as
| molasses then yes.
| javcasas wrote:
| It also doesn't use 1.5 CPU cores non-stop.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| Are you running it on a particularly potatoey PC?
|
| On my fairly ancient Core i7-8700 I can have a video call
| open in one screen and be editing in Resolve on another.
| dijit wrote:
| There's something weird going on honestly.
|
| On an i9-14900K, arguably one of the fastest CPUs in the
| previous few years (and excusing their design defect that
| causes them to die); Teams is significantly slower than
| on the Quallcom Snapdragon X-Elite, or my Macbook.
|
| It seems to perform the same as it would on an i9
| platform as it does on i5 laptop's of the same generation
| (in terms of input latency and drawing to the screen
| etc;)
|
| I know it's apples/oranges, that ARM CPUs are
| substantially different than x86 ones, but the fact that
| it seems to be the same on significantly lower clocked
| (and lower consumptive) chips indicate to me that
| something very bizarre is happening when it comes to
| Teams.
|
| ARM chips seem to be significantly better for electron
| applications, but something unique exists within Teams
| here.
| tomsmeding wrote:
| Hypothesis: that Qualcomm and that Macbook have higher
| memory bandwidth than your i9 system. This is dependent
| on your memory and your mainboard, not so much on the CPU
| itself. Perhaps Teams just uses way too much memory, and
| actually uses it all the time.
| dijit wrote:
| That is an interesting hypothesis, and makes sense based
| on the generationality of the issue.
|
| An i5-14500 has a comparable memory bandwidth as an
| i9-14900k
|
| https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/compare.
| htm...
| 7952 wrote:
| No idea, but I have found that edge can be more
| conservative in its use of GPU acceleration than Chrome.
| Maybe that is the case in the webview Teams uses.
| Too wrote:
| No potato, quite the contrary, and it's not that it hogs
| resources. It's just slow within. I can also keep a video
| call open and do other things _outside of teams_. But
| doing any multitasking within teams is just a nightmare.
| Open a second chat while in a video call makes the video
| into a thumbnail. Searching through other chats to copy
| and forward into a third chat... Just not possible,
| because everything is modal and resetting the scroll
| location when toggling between. On top of that it's just
| overall slow slow slow.
| Levitating wrote:
| It's not that it hogs resources. The app is just slow. So
| so so so terribly slow.
|
| And half of the time it crashes. Or the video/audio
| doesn't work.
| shaneofalltrad wrote:
| Exactly my case, powerful Ubuntu setup, App sucks, Teams
| in Chrome sucks, but soon as I run on Edge, no problems
| Levitating wrote:
| At my company we typically use Firefox with containers
| because Teams didn't have account switching. But then
| actually calling is so unstable we regularly have to
| switch to chromium.
|
| Not surprised it properly works on Edge at all.
| freedomben wrote:
| Exactly, I've been very pleasantly surprised at how well
| teams works in the browser on Linux. Much better than zoom!
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I worked in an all Linux dev shop. Our Lead refused to
| install Electron apps and ran them in Chrome tabs instead. It
| just worked. I dont remember how we ran Teams back then
| though.
| pmontra wrote:
| It works but it takes a long time to load.
|
| I've got two customers that both use Slack for everything
| except calls. One does calls in Meet and the other one in
| Teams. I asked to the Teams one and they told me that Teams
| works for everybody every time. Slack sometimes has problems
| with the video or audio setup. Too bad, because huddles are
| only one click away.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| My experience is the complete opposite.
|
| Granted I haven't tried O365 in about a year since it was so
| unusable in Firefox.
|
| As far as teams goes, I use it in the same version chromium
| on the same OS on two different computers; one works fine
| most of the time (main issue is it sometimes switches the
| audio back to the first item listed by Linux, which is not my
| USB headset). The other computer is terrible. Somewhere
| between 4-48 hours it pops up a tiny (maybe 40px) banner at
| the top saying "you need to sign in again" meanwhile there
| are no notifications and any messages I send are silently
| queued with no obvious indication that they haven't been
| delivered. Before I figured this out, I was just randomly out
| of communication with my coworkers, with both sides thinking
| we were sending the other person messages that they were
| ignoring. Clicking the "sign in" button on the banner just
| seems to reload teams and doesn't even ask me to sign in.
| georgefrowny wrote:
| > If we could do it in 1995 they should be able to do it 30
| years later.
|
| Google Drive still doesn't work on Linux.
|
| So much big tech shit just didn't care about Linux and it's
| even worse in Asia and industry where up to now you might as
| well grow three heads before you suggest not using Windows.
|
| It'll eventually change, but at least in China it'll probably
| be an even more closed down Huawei or similar OS rather then
| Linux. Neither WeChat or the commercial variant have Linux
| support, and at least the latter doesn't seem to have a PWA
| alternative. So I have a VM that absolutely destroys fan and
| battery life.
| pjmlp wrote:
| They only care to the point it is a cheaper UNIX, that is how
| its adoption took off in the dotcom wave, sponsored by big
| tech in first place, and only because there was a big
| question mark regarding BSD back then.
| EbNar wrote:
| Teams is literally the worst program I have ever used. Whoever
| designed that interface should be publicly shamed.
| klardotsh wrote:
| Teams is one of the only exceptions I can think of to my
| "blame the system, not the developer" rule with regards to
| corporate software.
|
| No, in Teams' case, they somehow managed to take a trivial
| problem that was solved quite well 30-40-odd years ago
| (albeit in a slightly different skin - IRC) and completely
| botch it in every way imaginable, and then a few more ways
| not even the most creative of QA engineer could have possibly
| imagined a team messing up such a basic problem set.
|
| It's finally a little bit less bad than it was 2-3 years ago,
| so the trend line is slightly angling upwards out of hell
| now, where the bar has been, but that's really not saying
| much.
| nolok wrote:
| Like many I use a variety on those chat programs, Zulip for
| my companies, Slack for some customers, good old IRC for some
| open source things, Discord for gaming, ... They all have
| some strenght and some weakness.
|
| But then Teams keeps showing up because "everyone knows it",
| "you already have it through office", ... And somehow I can't
| name a single strenght for it. It's just plain bad.
|
| It reminds me of the galaxy of "prime" service from Amazon
| beside delivery, that don't need to compete on their own
| merit but benefit from the main product they're attached to:
| on its own, it should have died a dishonorable death a long
| time ago.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Couldn't agree more.
| cycomanic wrote:
| As bad as teams is, there is absolutely no comparison to the
| crap that is slack. Just a number of things I regularly
| encounter: 1. Slack selecting speakers instead of headphones
| for call, even though I've used the headphones just before.
| 2. Calls ringing on my mobile that has been quietly sitting
| on the desk, instead of on the desktop that I've been typing
| on. 3. Mobile and desktop client being completely out of
| sync, it sometimes takes several minutes for messages typed
| on the mobile to show up on the desktop or vice versa. 4. I
| always have to select which screen to share twice before it
| shares (non of the other programs have this issue) 5. Don't
| get me started on the worst search ever, it's almost always
| easier to scroll than to search if it wasn't for: 6. Whoever
| thought it was a good idea that we should everything older
| than 15 messages or so back from the server. So instead of
| just quickly scrolling up it becomes an excercise of wading
| through molasses.
|
| 7. The absolute brain dead formatting, which makes typing
| equations or e.g. python exponents super annoying (no I
| didn't want to have this text bold)
|
| I mean don't get me wrong, I'm not a big fan of teams either,
| but it's absolutely mind boggling how slack got to such a
| dominant position in this space
| dijit wrote:
| Not a fan of slack.
|
| Teams is unjustifiably worse than slack.
|
| The only way you can hold this opinion is if you haven't
| been forced to use Teams.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| At work for some reason we use both Slack and Teams
| because part of the company likes one and another part of
| the company likes the other, so i actually get to have
| simultaneous experience with both.
|
| I use both on Linux via Firefox (their tabs are pinned
| side by side). I prefer Teams because:
|
| a) Slack _constantly_ forgets my credentials and i need
| to go through a whole dance of logging in, proving i 'm
| human by clicking bicycles, having it email some code.
| Pretty much every day.
|
| b) Slack, for some reason i cannot fathom, randomly
| switches me to "do not disturb" mode (or something like
| that) even though i'm right there. Not even away: it
| switches to a mode where i do not receive notifications
| when someone messages me. Fortunately it still does the
| beepy sound and i do keep the tabs visible on my screen
| all the time so i actually do notice messages, but i had
| at least a couple of questions from others why i am in
| that mode.
|
| c) Slack does not support audio calls. Not sure why, but
| it doesn't work in Firefox. Teams does work just fine.
| Fortunately all work meetings are done via Teams and all
| people on Stack are also on Teams so if someone wants an
| audio call we use Teams, but still, a negative for Slack.
|
| The only issue i had with Teams is that its text input
| can get confused when typing `backticks` and it seems to
| dislike using emojis at any place except the end of the
| text. Also Slack has some (old) meme emojis, though if
| that is a good thing or not depends on your taste :-P.
| dijit wrote:
| Oh interesting, I could say all of these same points for
| Teams.
|
| Being signed out on Teams leads to a really slim banner
| at the top (of the already messy UI) that tells me to
| sign in again, the strip is even _grey_... the only
| reason I notice I am signed out at all is because I have
| notifications on my phone that aren 't reflected in the
| Teams UI. This is a consequence of my IT department
| having short sessions, but the fact that this is how
| Teams displays it- is a fragrantly terrible UX.
|
| The more annoying one is when my phone is signed out I
| just stop getting push notifications. There's no
| indication that I need to sign in again or anything. I
| think Slack would have the same issue with short session
| times to be honest, unless they send you a push
| notification every time your credentials expire which is
| also frustrating.
|
| Teams working in Firefox is relatively recent, afaik it
| still doesn't work in Safari. I think I specifically had
| to install Chrome a few times to join job interviews that
| were conducted on Teams as Firefox definitely was _not_
| supported a year ago.
| prmoustache wrote:
| > c) Slack does not support audio calls. Not sure why,
| but it doesn't work in Firefox. Teams does work just
| fine. Fortunately all work meetings are done via Teams
| and all people on Stack are also on Teams so if someone
| wants an audio call we use Teams, but still, a negative
| for Slack.
|
| My slack experience is old so I don't remember but on
| msteams there aren't audio calls at all. All calls all
| video calls, the only difference the audio/video call
| buttons do is wether your webcam will be activated or not
| from the beginning but you can still disable it before
| joining on a video call and you can always activating
| your camera even if you pressed the telephone looking
| button to start the call.
| pjmlp wrote:
| At least Slack knows about threading conversations.
| tsukurimashou wrote:
| slack is shit but teams is worst
| intothemild wrote:
| The most amazing ball that was dropped during the pandemic
| was everyone making video call software better .. except
| slack, which made it worse.
|
| How the heck do you screw this up so badly?
| bartread wrote:
| Spoken like someone who has never used Deltek Maconomy. Teams
| is really bad but not Deltek Maconomy bad. Nothing else I've
| used is.
|
| That being said, in the last job where I used it regularly,
| Teams was responsible for 100% of the blue screens I
| regularly experienced. Dell laptop and some quirk of
| interaction between Teams video calls, NVidia graphics
| drivers, and WiFi drivers than no update ever fixed. Very
| frustrating.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| I use Teams every day (for work, the company basically runs on
| it) for chat and meetings, and I'm one of those strange people
| who never really have much problem with it. I can think of one
| occasion in perhaps the last six months when it crashed and I
| had to kill and restart it. Otherwise it just sits there on my
| laptop and does its thing. Same with Outlook etc.
|
| So, what am I doing wrong? How do I get the authentic Teams
| user experience that everyone else here seemingly has?
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| You are not alone. I also personally find Teams more than ok
| even if I wish it was more snappy.
|
| Meetings work great. Compatible equipment in room makes
| everything feel seem less. Collaborative editing and file
| sharing are both awesome.
|
| Every time it's brought up on HN I get the feeling that
| people here use collaborative tools in a very different way I
| do. They mostly want something to chat via text which I and
| most of the people in my area of work use very little. I
| think that's where the disconnect comes from.
|
| Teams is not primarily a text chat software. It's not built
| for this purpose as that's not how most office workers
| collaborate. That's quite obvious.
| gausswho wrote:
| > Teams is not primarily a text chat software. It's not
| built for this purpose as that's not how most office
| workers collaborate. That's quite obvious.
|
| That's insightful. I gather your workday is a blend of
| collaborative document writing or video calls?
|
| At work, I'm at my best when I'm not in meetings nor
| documents. I'm writing text all day, some for computers,
| some for humans. But I can see how I'm in the minority
| across the spectrum of knowledge work.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| > Teams is not primarily a text chat software. It's not
| built for this purpose as that's not how most office
| workers collaborate. That's quite obvious.
|
| The problem is that it's a perfectly fine video meeting
| application (although what sociopath decided entering a
| meeting unmuted was a proper default), but many orgs try to
| push it as their chat application too. The UX for that is
| awful. And for some of us that _is_ the primary way we
| communicate. I started working from home in 2008,
| collaborating on code over Freenode long before that. Most
| eng teams I've been on these past 20 years coordinate on
| chat. It's hard when the business people think Teams is
| fine and then the rest of us have to use busted software.
| dijit wrote:
| You're not doing it wrong, if anything I'm genuinely happy
| for you.
|
| This isn't sarcasm or anything, I really mean it. If you're
| somehow on Teams' happy path and it does what you expect then
| I'm envious, I wish I was you and I am grateful that it's
| helpful to you at least.
|
| For me, though, the frustration stems from being forced to
| use it at work, which amplifies every quirk tenfold. Minor
| annoyances like duplicated groups of the same people
| (splitting chat histories across sessions), the "every team
| is a SharePoint site" bloat, and the massive resource drain
| (though that's easing as hardware improves) add up fast.
|
| That is to say that they also relay all of their calls
| through datacenters half a continent away, so if you're close
| to one of those then it's fine but the further you are the
| more likely you are to accidentally talk over people and so
| on, there's no peer-to-peer, even 1:1 calls are relayed with
| Teams; making Google Meet and Jitsi perform "better" (though
| people can't explain why).
|
| Then there's the dev-side slop: mangled code snippets in
| chats, meeting controls jammed at the top (pulling your eyes
| away from the camera), and--God help you: if you've ever
| tried building chatops integrations on it, you'd break down
| and cry. Like, real, actual office-bathroom breakdown tears.
| petepete wrote:
| Same for me, it works and allows me to do what I need to do.
| It does it neither gracefully or efficiently, but I think
| that's down to it trying to be everything at once, and the UI
| suffers as a result.
|
| The main thing that trips me up is that I often confuse my
| Outlook calendar for me Teams calendar - because they look
| almost the same but work completely differently.
| gausswho wrote:
| > The main thing that trips me up is that I often confuse
| my Outlook calendar for me Teams calendar - because they
| look almost the same but work completely differently.
|
| Makes you wonder how many teams does Microsoft have working
| on calendars.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Outlook, Teams, Exchange Web Access, and the electron-
| based email client all have different calendars with
| completely different capabilities.
| wilsonnb3 wrote:
| I think it might still be a toggleable option but the "new
| calendar" experience in teams is exactly the same as the
| outlook web calendar.
| globular-toast wrote:
| mIRC and many other clients just sat there and did their
| thing. 30 years ago. Countless projects have been coordinated
| via IRC. This isn't a high bar for chat software.
|
| Teams fails every day at its basic purpose. Chats are
| confusing, the threaded ones being utterly useless.
| Constantly have to use the mouse to do basic stuff like
| address people or change channel. Stuff randomly breaks all
| the time, syntax highlighting seems to break in some new way
| every other week. It's complete garbage software and a
| massive regression for those of us who remember proper,
| simple chat software from decades ago.
| p_ing wrote:
| mIRC fails at video conferencing, though.
|
| You're comparing apples to oranges.
| hpcjoe wrote:
| Teams regularly fails at video conferencing. It complains
| of low network bandwidth at random times, and I check my
| firewall (OpnSense with fq_codel enabled and reasonable
| bandwidth limits) to note that it under very light load.
|
| I am not sure if this is a server side thing at
| Microsoft, or a problem with the application itself. True
| under Windows, Linux, via local app, and via the web app.
|
| For larger meetings (> 50 people), we use zoom. Unlike
| teams, zoom generally just works. Quite well in fact.
|
| Teams is simply crap software, forced upon us. If we
| could jettison that and Outlook, I would be grateful.
| Though our IT looks at us in an unblinking stare, if we
| ask them to allow us to use any of the better clients on
| mobile, laptop, desktop, windows or linux. Its almost as
| if our third eye in the middle of our forehead opened up.
| FredrikSE wrote:
| I used Teams since released, never have those problems
| unless on a bad network. Use it several hours a day.
| ryanjshaw wrote:
| I'm also puzzled by the hate for Teams. I used Teams for
| years and developed on Power Platform. The integration
| between all the pieces of the MS stack is unrivaled.
|
| I now use Slack, Zoom, Google Workspace etc. and don't enjoy
| the experience at all. It feels low quality and messy
| compared to Teams.
| dijit wrote:
| Wow.
|
| I don't believe you.
|
| Making App integrations for Slack to basically anything is
| _pretty_ close to a joyful experience, the rest of it is
| comparable to other chat systems perhaps, but are you
| really telling me with a straight face that developing
| applications atop Teams (that do more than just plug other
| Microsoft things together) is actually a superior
| experience?
|
| I get that opinions are subjective and all that, but so you
| understand: I'm having the same reaction as if someone said
| to you that contracting gangrene is preferable to a walk in
| the park.
| ryanjshaw wrote:
| Yes. I've built apps on Power Platform and I've built a
| Slack App; the Teams experience is superior, for me.
| Could it take some lessons from Slack - yes, a python or
| typescript code block in Power Automate would be awesome.
|
| As for your reaction: if your experience is so different,
| a useful attitude might be to ask why you have such an
| absurdly negative viewpoint.
| dijit wrote:
| Thanks for altering your comment to remove the "grow up"
| remark, it wasn't helpful.
|
| To tell you the truth I always assumed it was because
| Microsoft didn't really care about chatops or any
| integration that was not within their ecosystem (or a
| website). The experience is consistent with that
| viewpoint.
| jon-wood wrote:
| In the strictest form Teams "works". You can chat with
| people, you can do video calls, you can share files. Outside
| of the core "calling a person" experience though it's a mess,
| starting with the way the word Team is so overloaded, it has
| several different meanings within the Teams application.
| There's very few other places where its so apparent that a
| piece of software is bunch of other products all mashed
| together and shipped as fast as possible - you've got
| Sharepoint in there, Office, Skype for Business, and very
| little consideration seems to have gone into how to make all
| of those work together seamlessly.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| The biggest problems with Teams -- which I had to use daily
| for over a year and a half at my previous job -- is with its
| UX, not its implementation. I found bugs in the Linux client
| here and there, but they weren't showstoppers. But using it
| was just frustrating because it got in the way of
| communication and didn't work how I expected.
|
| It's just not good. When you compare it to Slack, etc. it's
| just constantly awkward and getting in the way. And it tries
| to do too much, on top of that.
|
| Slack is rapidly getting shittier though, so.
| dgan wrote:
| Techincally it works, but the UX is terrible. So many times I
| couldnt copy a message because of the stupid emojis popping
| up right below my mouse, so that you have opportunity to look
| dumb after sending a "heart" in a professional meeting about
| serious matter.
|
| Also, it HAS to rename my files.
|
| Also sending code barely works, and not for long messages
|
| This is just on top of my head
| larusso wrote:
| Not to be too snarky but I really detest teams. We use Slack in
| our company but the mothership is all teams. Every time I have
| to use it I spit in anger. It's the sum of all these weird
| usability issues etc. so my personal recommendation would be to
| always say it doesn't work ^^
| GuestFAUniverse wrote:
| Every slack I had to join professionally, the most active
| channel was the channel for non-work or not project related
| stuff. So, I had to use it, ask questions, point out non-
| working services, while watching the same person's
| responsibile for the disfunct services share trivia about
| their favorite animes, sci-fi or whatever crap of the day
| seemed more important.
|
| Thus, I detest communities having slack as a first point of
| contact.
| twelvedogs wrote:
| microsoft couldn't do it in 95 either
| pjmlp wrote:
| I really don't get what that team is up to, even ICQ would be
| so much better.
| happycube wrote:
| It's meant to be Just Good Enough to keep C-Suites from
| picking Zoom and Slack.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yeah, but like is no one proud on that team to actually
| deliver something useful?
| okayjustonemore wrote:
| Microsoft in a nutshell.
| constantcrying wrote:
| Never had any real issues with Teams in all these years, with
| lots of use. It worked just as well as using Slack.
|
| All around it seems to be some of the better Microsoft
| Software, the interface is decent and does not get into the
| way, the functionality and feature set is pretty good as well.
| E.g. granting other people access to your PC is a pretty cool
| and useful feature.
|
| I never understood the hate it gets on here. What particularly
| negative experiences do people have with it?
| osigurdson wrote:
| >> MS should hang their head in shame
|
| I hear this a lot but really, Teams works fine as far as I can
| tell. Click on meeting, check your hair on camera first, join
| meeting. It works fine 19 times out of 20 at least.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > It works fine 19 times out of 20 at least.
|
| But for something you use 3-5x a day, that is a noticeable
| problem every few days. Why it has such an awful reputation.
| osigurdson wrote:
| So so all of the hate is just due to some dropped calls?
| Realistically it isn't even that bad (likely more like 2%
| failure rate). For me, I use Teams but it isn't like I am
| in the application all day. If it were 10X better I
| wouldn't care very much - like MS word vs Google docs or
| whatever. I care a lot about text editors on the other
| hand.
| okayjustonemore wrote:
| The hate comes, deservedly I might add, from a lot more
| than just dropped calls. Terrible UI. Horrendous
| performance. Bloated apps. Confusing UX. Completely
| broken integration with the desktop/browser.
|
| Teams is an absolute mess.
| osigurdson wrote:
| >> Horrendous performance
|
| When I click on something in Teams it shows up in (I'd
| say) < 300ms most times. I'm sure it could be much faster
| if done better. However, is that what you mean by
| "horrendous" or are you seeing 30s freezes or something
| like that?
| jlarocco wrote:
| I don't know. I use the Linux and Windows clients, and to me
| they feel the same. They're not great, but I wouldn't say one
| is worse.
|
| In fact, I'd say all of the modern chat apps are pretty much
| equally terrible. They're all proprietary, bloated, web apps
| with terrible clients that people only use because they have to
| for work. Chat apps peaked in the early 2000s when the
| protocols were more open and you could use 3rd party apps like
| Trillian and Pidgin instead of the official clients.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| From a UI perspective, Teams is terrible, but there is one
| thing it does well and that's large meeting calls. Microsoft
| knows their customers: large companies.
|
| The boss doesn't see that you can't properly paste a piece of
| code in the chat, but he wants to make sure that everyone hears
| him at the annual talk. He wants it to connect to the company
| directory, make analytics, reflect the corporate hierarchy,
| make announcements, etc... He sees it as a one way, top down
| communication tool more than peer-to-peer, and for the former,
| Teams delivers. Developers hate it, but developers are not the
| ones who have the money and make these decisions.
|
| Still, that's a thing I miss about Bill Gates's Microsoft. It
| was certainly evil (Embrace Extend Extinguish, the fight
| against free software, etc...), but at least, they actually
| cared about usability and developers, not just pleasing big
| company bosses.
| v1ne wrote:
| Completely agreed. I sit in dismay, remembering the Microsoft
| I frowned upon back in the days as a Linux/FreeBSD user. But
| at least their software was accessible via keyboard and their
| translations were really good.
|
| Fast forward to now, after being a dev on Windows for years
| and loving it, and now their UX is a joke. For example, to
| jump back and forth between chats, neither the back/forth
| mouse buttons nor any other key combo works on macOS. You
| have to click the navigation buttons in the symbol bar
| instead. Translations are AI-powered, and that shows. Also,
| Teams is dog slow, which I also count as a UX issue.
| com2kid wrote:
| I remember working at MS a decade ago and how good out
| translation pipeline was. Tons of attention paid to
| cultural nuances even between different English dialects.
| We'd have separate translations for UK, US, AUS, and
| international English. We'd change not just words but the
| overall tone of messages based on the culture in different
| countries.
|
| So much care, and the expertise and professionalism of the
| people doing the worn was amazing.
| linguae wrote:
| It's sad to see the decline in the quality of desktop
| computing. I blame this on the rise of mobile apps and Web
| apps in the 2010s. It's not that mobile apps and Web apps
| are inherently bad; that's not the problem. The problems is
| that we have an entire generation of engineers who never
| learned desktop UI/UX conventions and principles.
|
| To make matters worse, in an attempt to save on development
| costs, mobile and Web applications have been deployed on
| the desktop, with the justification that it's better to
| have an app, even a shoddy one, than to not have one at
| all. What's appropriate on a smartphone or a tablet may not
| be appropriate on a desktop, and vice versa. The Web never
| had a mechanism for enforcing UI/UX guidelines, similar to
| the MS-DOS and Apple II days of computing.
|
| The sad thing is Microsoft and even Apple now have shoddy
| desktop apps, despite the fact they have the resources to
| make well-designed desktop apps, and that at one point they
| set standards for excellent desktop apps and conformed to
| them.
|
| We had a sweet spot in the 2000s with Windows 2000/XP/7 and
| Mac OS X and their ecosystems of desktop applications. It's
| been downhill since.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| That's also my opinion but I am ready to give them some
| excuse, because they have it harder than when it was just
| desktop computing.
|
| Now we expect a desktop _and_ a mobile app, also native
| and browser based. They all have different requirements.
| Even in the same category, such as iOS vs Android, some
| conventions are different. Having to write the app
| differently for each platform to make the best of it is
| not only expensive, but it may also be confusing to users
| who switch from one to another.
|
| For example let's say you have a button on your desktop
| app that sees little use, but it is a nice feature for
| the few times it is needed. Because it is a desktop and
| you have lots of space and a precise pointing device, it
| stays. But for your mobile version, there is simply no
| room for it, so you remove it and tweak the workflow a
| bit so that it isn't needed anymore. Taken individually,
| they are both good decisions, but I can guarantee that
| the desktop user will complain that it is missing on the
| mobile app, and he would be right. It means you have to
| make a compromise you didn't have to make before.
| BuildTheRobots wrote:
| > The boss doesn't see that you can't properly paste a piece
| of code in the chat
|
| Of all my many gripes with Teams, it usually handles code
| surprisingly well. Single `inline` and triple backtick blocks
| usually render as you'd expect.
|
| OneNote on the other hand doesn't support a code-block at
| all, and is worse (if you can believe it) than storing cli
| commands in Word docs.
| woutercx wrote:
| We use Citrix and Windows 11 in our work environment. I keep
| Teams open in Citrix so that I can copy links from the browser
| into the chat. The links then show the title for the link, I
| like that functionality. I also have it open on my Laptop as
| well (Windows 11) for doing calls and meetings. Our Citrix is
| slow, so I don't do calls there. Fun thing is that often when I
| get a call in Teams it is automatically picked up on my laptop
| without me accepting it.. It is "auto-answer" functionality I
| tell the colleagues who don't understand how it is possible
| that I pick up in 50 milliseconds :-). It is caused by Teams
| being open in 2 places. Weird.. Another weird issue I have with
| the 2 Teams instances being open is that when I get dragged
| into a group call and I answer, I'm in the call for 2 seconds
| and then the call gets disconnected. Then they try to call me
| again, I get disconnected again. Then I have to kill the Teams
| instance in Citrix to make it possible for them to add me to
| the call.. Another weird issue is that sometimes when I'm in a
| group call on my laptop and I try to look something up in my
| Citrix instance of Teams or even click in a chat thread, my
| call gets disconnected on the laptop..
| lpcvoid wrote:
| Your technical work environment sounds horrible to me.
| Windows + Citrix is enough to send me screaming. Kudos that
| you pull through like that.
| sans_souse wrote:
| upvoting out of principle
| Neil44 wrote:
| The Teams works well as a PWA on Ubuntu, everything works meeting
| ings chats etc etc.
| 0ld wrote:
| I've been using teams for years in a browser (on my FreeBSD
| desktop), and I find it good enough for doing my job - chats
| work, calls work, presentations work, screen sharing works. or
| should I say mostly work... sure, it's as glitchy as it ever was
| and may fail for any reason at any time, but you don't really
| need an app to experience all that
| LouDNL wrote:
| Please don't, now I can no longer say that I cannot use teams. If
| you want to use it so bad, go back to Windows...
| skrebbel wrote:
| You can, but now you have to be honest about why.
| microflash wrote:
| You can still dodge the bullet by saying this is an
| "unofficial" client using which may violate an unknown amount
| of compliance bullet points.
| magguzu wrote:
| Man I hate Teams with a passion but if someone on my team said
| this I'd know they were full of it. I use Linux and the PWA is
| functional enough.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Just use the Web interface, it is the same anyway.
| crimsonnoodle58 wrote:
| Microsoft Edge for Linux + Teams installed as an app (PWA) works
| perfectly fine for all our devs, anything else like this is just
| an additional security risk.
| ris wrote:
| Native applications are a scourge, if only from a security
| standpoint.
| jxdxbx wrote:
| I have tried and failed to use the Mac Teams app repeatedly. I
| will try to join a meeting I've been invited to, but there is
| some conflict between my personal and word Microsoft accounts
| that causes it to flip out. Only the web app reliably lets me
| actually join a meeting.
| ta12653421 wrote:
| does it allow to disable(!) incoming(!) video completely?
| Xss3 wrote:
| My biggest gripe with teams is their markdown formatting. It
| works if you type it out character by character, but paste some
| Markdown in and it does nothing.
| self_awareness wrote:
| Teams is good with video calls, but so was Skype, which was
| apparently used as the video backend system.
|
| Rest of Teams? Abysmal.
|
| Logging to text files? Missing. Search? Broken. Speed? Sometimes
| the UI jumps around and I click the wrong things, because UI
| hasn't been loaded by the time I'm trying to click something.
| Formatting? Sometimes it's impossible, and I need to _edit_ the
| message after sending, to be able to properly format it.
|
| If you don't have problems with Teams, you're simply not using
| them enough.
| Havoc wrote:
| Let me guess it runs on a potato unlike the official one...
| jll29 wrote:
| Why would I want to use Teams on Linux? One reason to use Linux
| is to avoid such bloatware with unbearably poor UX.
|
| Rumor has it that a usability consultant died from a heart attack
| when he saw the first alpha build, but I may misremember the
| story (or confuse it with the deadly joke by Monty Python).
|
| I'm totally fine with text-based chat, and it had better be
| implementing an open standard (e.g. USENET news or Jabber).
|
| And it's by no means restricted to Microsoft: many companies use
| unclear interfaces with non-existant discoverability, sluggish
| response times, and cryptic menu names like "..." or "+"; and
| nobody neads multi-row menus at the top to compete for attention
| with left-side column menus, each of which featuring symbols that
| lack clarity - since when is one pane of icons not enough?
| dangus wrote:
| I use Linux because I find that it has more capability than
| commercial operating systems for my needs.
|
| I do count "running commercial software" as a need of mine. I
| would not be using Linux if I couldn't run Windows games on
| Steam, 1Password, Slack, Discord, etc.
|
| Nobody's forcing you to install Teams, and someone out there is
| breathing a sigh of relief because they have another option
| besides Mac and Windows for running the programs they _need_ to
| run.
|
| I'm not really in a race to be the most opinionated user on the
| planet who refuses to use an app with a ... or + menu, I just
| want a good OS that runs any program I might need.
| ukd1 wrote:
| Some customers (e.g. DoD, gov) basically exclusively use it, so
| you'd have to if you ever interacted with them. This is a win.
| surajrmal wrote:
| Because you work for a company that uses Microsoft teams most
| likely. It's not always a choice you get to make.
| osigurdson wrote:
| >> Why would I want to use Teams on Linux?
|
| Well, I use Teams on Linux sometimes because I have a meeting
| and using a Linux machine at the time.
| a012 wrote:
| It's for when your company gave you the freedom of installing
| linux on work machine but mandated Teams for company wide
| communication
| Mashimo wrote:
| > Why would I want to use Teams on Linux? One reason to use
| Linux is to avoid such bloatware with unbearably poor UX.
|
| That might be YOUR reason, but I'm sure there are plenty to use
| linux besides to avoid bloatware.
| IanTerzo wrote:
| I'm actually making an alternative client since I couldn't stand
| the normal one. https://github.com/IanTerzo/Squads
| krauses wrote:
| Would this make it easier to consume and store Teams data
| locally, avoiding the need for tagging M365 Graph API, if the
| goal is to build analytics or automation on top of Teams for
| things my personal account has access to?
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| For Linux made me instantly remember the phrase
|
| "you can run, but you can not hide".
| JaggerJo wrote:
| Nice! A screenshot in the readme would be a great addition. I was
| looking for a native macOS Teams client a while ago - but to my
| knowledge this is the first 3rd party Teams client.
|
| The Microsoft Teams client frustrates me daily.
| baby wrote:
| Why not use the webapp?
| okayjustonemore wrote:
| Teams is one of those apps that I wish would just leave the realm
| of the living and never come back in any shape or form.
|
| Terrible, terrible app. Peak Microsoft lazy design.
| dustymcp wrote:
| I use it, it has its quirks but surprisingly its buggy and faster
| than the official one..
| worldsavior wrote:
| Looks cool but some pictures would help.
| nottorp wrote:
| It's not a client but a wrapped web site though.
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