Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Unofficial Microsoft Teams client for Linux

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 256 posts

Re: Unofficial Microsoft Teams client for Linux

#191

Post by prmoustache »

badsectoracula wrote: post #155
dijit wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

> 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.

Re: Unofficial Microsoft Teams client for Linux

#193

Post by GuB-42 »

jacquesm wrote: post #69

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.

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.

Re: Unofficial Microsoft Teams client for Linux

#194

Post by v1ne »

GuB-42 wrote: post #193
jacquesm wrote: post #69

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.

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 announc…

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.

Re: Unofficial Microsoft Teams client for Linux

#195

Post by sigseg1v »

jonathanlydall wrote: post #75
hosteur wrote: post #68

Please make an unofficial client for windows too. The official one sucks so much it is hard to even describe.

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).

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.

Re: Unofficial Microsoft Teams client for Linux

#196

Post by jonathanlydall »

varispeed wrote: post #96
jonathanlydall wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

"Works for me, so it must for everyone else"

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?”

Re: Unofficial Microsoft Teams client for Linux

#197

Post by [deleted] »

GuB-42 wrote: post #193
jacquesm wrote: post #69

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.

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 announc…

[deleted]

Re: Unofficial Microsoft Teams client for Linux

#199

Post by hvea »

jonathanlydall wrote: post #196
varispeed wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Works for me, so it must for everyone else"

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?”

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.

Re: Unofficial Microsoft Teams client for Linux

#200

Post by aidenn0 »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #89
jacquesm wrote: post #69

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.

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.

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.

Post reply on HN