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Unofficial Microsoft Teams client for Linux

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Re: Unofficial Microsoft Teams client for Linux

#21
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

I don't see this behaviour at all, and I live in Teams on Windows, web and Android. It has improved over time.

Re: Unofficial Microsoft Teams client for Linux

#22
post #3

Alternative solution: Flee any company that uses Microsoft Teams.

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.

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

Re: Unofficial Microsoft Teams client for Linux

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Having org wide joinable channels is useful.

Splitting small group chat across more than a couple of chats is insane.

Re: Unofficial Microsoft Teams client for Linux

#25
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?

Re: Unofficial Microsoft Teams client for Linux

#28
post #25

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?

Clear the teams cache, it can persist after uninstall.

Re: Unofficial Microsoft Teams client for Linux

#29
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.

Re: Unofficial Microsoft Teams client for Linux

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 th…

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.
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