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The Horror of Microsoft Teams

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Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's built on Electron and still no native Linux client. There's a web version, but you can't join meetings or screenshare. There are 3rd party wrappers for the web version that enable meetings, but you still can't screenshare. At the very least their web version needs to have parity with the desktop application. It's 2019, browsers can handle voice chat and screensharing!

Wow, I’m pretty sure Hipchat is built on Electron and has had all these features for years! Microsoft must really be struggling

"Microsoft must really be struggling"

Not really. They are making more money than ever. They don't have customers asking for a Linux client in large enough numbers. That's all it is.

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#272
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer native widgets to whatever application-enforced fad of the year is current. Apps are lauded for providing "dark mode" now; when ten years ago I simply switched GTK themes. To say nothing of accessibility. We've gone way backwards in UX.

To be fair, dark GTK themes don't really work. I say this as someone who uses dark GTK themes. Far too many applications end up with dark text on a dark background, and Firefox applies your theme colors to websites so websites also end up with dark text on dark backgrounds. At least a dark mode created by the application's authors usually works.

This has been a problem since forever. Even on Windows 95 it was like that. Probably before that. Windows does have special values for system colors, like text, window background, text background etc. But for some reason, a lot of programs ended up setting the text color explicitly to black and leaving everything else at the system colors. So you better left the color scheme at default. Which is probably fine for the average user, but there were these high contrast schemes which were white on black. People who actually had to rely on this must have had a bad time. Just how these schemes also increased the font size. Doing that, or increasing the system's dpi setting guaranteed that all text in every application would be truncated.

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#273
My company rolled out teams but then did it in such a way or only the designated administrators can create channels... if you're not a designated administrator you can only do multi-party dm to dm chat.

The effect was probably half intended which is to say only the various corp administrators actually used teams, the rest of us just ignore teams save for their randomly blasted 'app is being updated guys!...guys?' and continue to use our half-baked email threads or GroupMe groups or other shadow IT solutions because the Enterprise solution is so painful / pseudo insulting.

Conversations.im / chatsecure / gajim all with an ejabberd server and omemo style encryption works a treat. GroupMe for group chats from legacy groups from before the xmpp days which we plan to migrate to xmpp and yeah we have no need of teams.

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#274

The Teams client is built on Electron? Why? Developers need to stop building slow applications. This is ridiculous. It's 2019 and software is slower than it was in the 90s. It must take an enormous number of CPU cycles to execute simple tasks in an Election-based app. It's just incredibly inefficient. I heard similar things about Slack – that it was built on Node, maybe Electron, and was dog slow, especially to open.…

This is the one criticism that I actually agree with. Electron apps are pretty painful.

If they are going to keep doing this they need a way to compile the things to native binaries. I don't know...something.

I personally get really kind of weirded out when I see simple software load Node. Adobe, I'm looking at you.

I'm really hoping that the cross platform dotnet stuff becomes a viable option now that the XAML stack has been open sourced.

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you open a 10GB file in it? Mine is using 200MB right now with a PHP project open in it.

Is that project 200MB of PHP? Because 200MB of RAM seems obese at best for a text editor.

I agree with you. However I don’t think it’s fair to call VSCode just a text editor. It’s not quite an IDE, but it’s a weird middle ground.

The nearest IDE I can think of is kdevelop or jetbrains. kdevelop is disturbingly light, but jetbrains consumes considerably more resources than VSCode. (And for good reason. They tend to do more)

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#276

I don't know. A lot of these issues (and I must admit I totally lost interest at the point I got to the complaints about message threading, although I did skim to the end[1]) are really personal preference. Take message threading as an example: we use it all the time and it works well. I actually prefer it to Slack threads. My main beefs with Teams are: - Performance: it's just far too damn slow to switch views. - Aw…

That's a good point about switching between different companies "teams". That takes forever.

And why does it have that crazy "you're offline sorry" thing. That's the whole point of having a local client installation.

All in all, I've never worked anywhere that used Slack or Teams "well"...so I'm not sure why either of them engender so much rage or love.

I just wonder why I have to have Teams and Outlook? Why not meld the two and get rid of Outlook finally. For that matter, why not have a tab in Teams with the web version of Outlook?

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#277
post #79

We currently use Teams and everyone on the team absolutely hates it. I am actively looking at alternatives such as mattermost or slack to get us onto something that doesn't run like complete garbage. Also, why did this have to be developed using electron? If Teams were a native application, or even written using something on the .NET-side, we would probably have about 20% the complaints we do today. Watching an appli…

Check out Twist. It's great.

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#278
I'm an admin of both Slack and Teams. Almost all of this is due to how his org configured Teams. While there's some valid complaints, a lot of this comes down to IT not understanding the needs of their users or simply not caring about the needs of their users because of some stupid opaque management decisions. You can mute chats same as on Slack. You can be forced to autojoin same as in Slack. I have regular meetings with customers in Teams. While Slack is absolutely still better at what it does most of his horrible experience comes down to crappy settings by his IT. The mobile device integration is truly abysmal though. Hoping in apps requires you to install those apps as well to do simple things like project management. The whole point of hooking in an app is to not have to go directly to said app. We haven't had a problem with notifications either. Most of what's possible in locking down Teams is possible to do it Slack it's just not default.

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#279

The Teams client is built on Electron? Why? Developers need to stop building slow applications. This is ridiculous. It's 2019 and software is slower than it was in the 90s. It must take an enormous number of CPU cycles to execute simple tasks in an Election-based app. It's just incredibly inefficient. I heard similar things about Slack – that it was built on Node, maybe Electron, and was dog slow, especially to open.…

It's built on Electron and still no native Linux client. There's a web version, but you can't join meetings or screenshare. There are 3rd party wrappers for the web version that enable meetings, but you still can't screenshare. At the very least their web version needs to have parity with the desktop application. It's 2019, browsers can handle voice chat and screensharing!

>It's built on Electron and still no native Linux client

Remember this next time their PR team tries to pull another round of "Microsoft has totally changed you guys, we swear! The new Microsoft loves Linux"

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not create seperate private channels and make vendors single channel users?

I’ve seen that too, but having a whole separate instance gives the users a more flexible environment. There’s also the issue of discoverability... sometimes the company doesn’t want employees and vendors to know that certain relationships exist.

And you can federate the two slack instances as well as a separate firewall without having to create multiple accounts for the same users to access multiple instances.
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