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How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition

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Re: How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition

#211

Post by LinAGKar »

duiker101 wrote: post #116
bArray wrote: post #111

How Not to Support HTML Text, write.as Edition: > If you're stuck using Zoom, jump on [one]( https://community.zoom.com/t5/Meetings/Sharing-application-w... ) [of]( https://community.zoom.com/t5/Meetings/Linux-screen-sharing-... ) [the]( https://community.zoom.com/t5/Meetings/Unable-to-share-scree... ) [..] Why do you need JS to translate your unreadable HTML into readable HTML?

> _Pssst, coming from Hacker News? Add a ".md" to the URL_ This might have been added after your comment. Link with md: https://write.as/n5r0vjolumdnuk2k.md

For some reason that message only shows up when you're already on the .md URL. If you go to https://write.as/n5r0vjolumdnuk2k it's not there.

Now at least the link here is updated, though my RSS reader had the old link.

Re: How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition

#212

Post by mcfedr »

It's amazing the amount of engineering zoom is willing to do to work around os security.

Just because they don't want to ask user permission to do screen sharing they do this while screen shot thing.

Reminds of how they made a whole security issues filled webserver for macos just to avoid the browser security button to open their app.

Re: How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition

#213

Post by mcfedr »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #30
DarthNebo wrote: post #7

Not surprised at all. Instead of making use of the WebRTC API in the browser, they just threw us back to Skype days of needing a native client installed on your OS....

Really? They're the only commercial company that bothers to create a native client (and not a Electron app) and you complain that you would prefer to have no client at all? I don't think that's the majority opinion... I'm no fan of them (I think free apps are up to the task), but give me a native client _any day_ over something that runs in a browser. I don't want any more multi-GB RAM hoarding processes running 24h…

Yes, the desktop client is a complete pain, I have to join a zoom call with a client every few months and for that I have to install a security hold riddled client.

Everything else just opens in my browser where I'm doing 70% of my work anyway, and every random place I visit is secured in it's box

Re: How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition

#214

Post by the_why_of_y »

denton-scratch wrote: post #138

> In 2016, Fedora switched to Wayland entirely, and has since been joined by Ubuntu, RHEL, Debian, and others. Debian, for one, has not switched to Wayland entirely. I didn't read on; counterfactuals tend to have that effect on me.

Debian has switched to Wayland with the release of buster (version 10) in 2019.

https://www.debian.org/releases/buster/amd64/release-notes/c...

Re: How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition

#215

Post by jmrm »

Too wrote: post #207
not2b wrote: post #177

Zoom has better Linux support than almost any proprietary desktop application of similar complexity. For pretty much anything else only a web client is provided. My non-technical wife has no trouble using the Ubuntu version, flipping between using the laptop sound and earbuds. True, she doesn't need desktop sharing and there are issues with that. The fact that there's any support at all for desktop Linux (beyond "it…

Haven’t tried Zoom on Linux but there the competitor Microsoft Teams is a total disaster Electron app. Beating that one is a really low bar. Starting with screen sharing since that’s the main topic here. Doesn’t work at all on wayland so no point to even compare further. Moving on to UI performance, it must be among the worst applications I’ve ever seen since 1993. Even on a super beefy gaming machine. Basic stuff li…

Totally true. I really dislike Teams.

With the same account I had about the same bugs in Teams in different, OS with different computers, and even in my phone, and every time in every machine in every OS I had to close the application and open it again to solve it. They funny thing here is that they weren't account related fails, like not having permission to do Z thing, but not having audio, video, or being unable to watch a shared screen.

By the other hand, a simple thing like Google Meets have worked in any OS without any problem to most of the people I know, and the problems were usually related to microphone and webcam permissions.

Re: How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition

#216

Post by fatboy93 »

throwdbaaway wrote: post #182
pmontra wrote: post #134

Two questions. 1. Why not the .md URL for everybody? 2. Is this really a problem with Zoom or one with Wayland and the Linux distros? I mean Fedora switched to Wayland in 2016 and the screensharing API was added only in 2018. A rushed deployment? Then maybe the Wayland team should make a list of the applications that must absolutely work with Wayland and support their vendors to release a correct implementation, not…

> Is this really a problem with Zoom or one with Wayland and the Linux distros? I would say this is really a problem with Zoom, mostly due to the lack of attention paid to their web client. For me, when it comes to video conferencing, the "table stakes" is working duplex audio over bluetooth, and so far only pipewire has solved this, which means Linux only. After that, two very important features to have are screen s…

Just curious, why does Google meet support blurring whereas zoom doesn't on linux?

This is on the same ThinkPad with 2 cores (broadwell era).

I tried Zoom's Blur function on an old as hell Dell Inspiron, probably the first generation i5 on windows and it works well there!

Re: How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition

#217

Post by throwdbaaway »

avrionov wrote: post #172

a few comments from somebody who worked for many years for a competitor to Zoom. The article author complains about some relatively minor details but completely misses the big picture. I'm not going to talk about the availability and quality of the Wayland API, this was covered in other posts. Here is what the decision looks like from the POV of someone building a product: - Zoom is one of the few collaboration produ…

> The native clients offer much better performance on every operating system.

Background blur uses significantly less CPU in Google Meet running as a chrome/chromium tab, than in native Zoom Linux client. Besides, Zoom Linux client also makes some arbitrary decision that my more powerful i7-3720QM is not qualified to have background blur enabled, while my less powerful i5-8250U is allowed to do so. Background blur works just fine with both CPUs in Google Meet.

From your POV, perhaps Zoom product/engineering is doing a good enough job. From my POV, what we have is a crappy Zoom Linux client and a half-arsed Zoom web client. And if corporate wants to give everyone Mac and Windows machines only, just so its highly paid engineers and highly paid product managers can share their screen over a Zoom session, who can argue with that logic?

Re: How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition

#218

Post by denton-scratch »

the_why_of_y wrote: post #214
denton-scratch wrote: post #138

> In 2016, Fedora switched to Wayland entirely, and has since been joined by Ubuntu, RHEL, Debian, and others. Debian, for one, has not switched to Wayland entirely. I didn't read on; counterfactuals tend to have that effect on me.

Debian has switched to Wayland with the release of buster (version 10) in 2019. https://www.debian.org/releases/buster/amd64/release-notes/c...

The Debian default became Wayland with Buster. Xorg is still supported. The very second sentence of the linked release notes states that Xorg is still installed by default.

Re: How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition

#219

Post by Hakashiro »

suby wrote: post #4

I still cannot run a Wayland session on my machine w/ an nvidia 3080 with the latest drivers. It either fails to boot (KDE) or runs at about 15 FPS (Gnome). It seems a little unreasonable to be this mad at a company for not supporting an environment that doesn't work for the vast majority of hardware out there. Especially given that you can just use Zoom within Firefox.

Using Linux is not a practical decision. It is an ethical/moral decision or simply just because you like tinkering. That's fine. I like getting shit done.

But then, getting mad because your favourite closed source company doesn't support Linux well is a little ridiculous. Zoom works fine on macOS and Windows. Linux is always bound to have issues one way or another, and if that's not enough, there's not even an incentive for developers to do things the right way, so get over it.

Re: How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition

#220

Post by FengLengshun »

...is it just me, or is the site broken? The link didn't display correctly and it shows as the raw markdown instead of the formatted result (checked with both Brave and Firefox, in private windows in case it's some extension).

Is that just how the site is?

It's very distracting regardless.

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