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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 :(
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ^^
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.
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?
> One reason to use Linux is to avoid such bloatware with unbearably poor UX.
This is just tech snobbery.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For notifications, the Administrator needs to enable the NotificationsAllowedForURLs policy, which automatically allows notifications for Teams on the web:
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have one thats purveying over apparently linux, mac, chrome, firefox... when you screenshare on multiple monitors (or workspaces) the screen stops updating.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
>> 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.
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.
True! I've been doing this for years on Linux. I use a dedicated Chromium instance in app mode:
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.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?
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.
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:
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:
(gtk-launch uses flags from the .desktop file so you don't have to repeat them)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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
It also doesn't use 1.5 CPU cores non-stop.
Exactly, I've been very pleasantly surprised at how well teams works in the browser on Linux. Much better than zoom!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
mIRC fails at video conferencing, though.
You're comparing apples to oranges.
Teams is literally the worst program I have ever used. Whoever designed that interface should be publicly shamed.
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.
Couldn't agree more.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
At least Slack knows about threading conversations.
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?
slack is shit but teams is worst
Teams doesn't work much better on Mac. It's easily the worst program I have to use.
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 :(
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.
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.
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.
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.
Then again, what they did to Skype is a study case in how to destroy a platform users loved.
Some of the audio stack is probably still from Skype.
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?
I used Teams in Firefox on Linux and didn't have any issues with it, other than it being generally slow and bad.
I really don't get what that team is up to, even ICQ would be so much better.
It's meant to be Just Good Enough to keep C-Suites from picking Zoom and Slack.
> 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.
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.
Some of my coworkers connect every day to our calls with Linux machines.
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.
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.
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.
microsoft couldn't do it in 95 either
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 ^^
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.
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?
It’s for when your company gave you the freedom of installing linux on work machine but mandated Teams for company wide communication
>> 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.
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.
Because you work for a company that uses Microsoft teams most likely. It's not always a choice you get to make.
> One reason to use Linux is to avoid such bloatware with unbearably poor UX.
This is just tech snobbery.
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'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.
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.
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 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.
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.
"Works for me, so it must for everyone else"
Could try running teams-for-linux in WSL2 on Windows?
It's effectively malware.
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.
The Web never goes out of style!
I avoid Teams as much as possible, but when I have to join a Teams meeting the PWA works fine.
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.
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...
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...
You can still dodge the bullet by saying this is an “unofficial” client using which may violate an unknown amount of compliance bullet points.
You can, but now you have to be honest about why.
Let me guess it runs on a potato unlike the official one...
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.
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
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
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.
What on earth was in that file?
My guess: an entire VM wrapped in a binary
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.
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.
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.
If only they fixed screen sharing on firefox in the official web version...
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?
My screen share went from fine to low resolution all the time. Really annoying.
I have one thats purveying over apparently linux, mac, chrome, firefox... when you screenshare on multiple monitors (or workspaces) the screen stops updating.
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.)
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.
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...
lol android/windows user here. all those bugs are so common, it's hilarious how bad teams is.
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.
I agree. Screen sharing in Teams used to work in Firefox but not in the current version (144). It works in Chrome though.
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.
works fine for me
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.
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
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.
The Teams works well as a PWA on Ubuntu, everything works meeting ings chats etc etc.
Just use the Web interface, it is the same anyway.
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.
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.
does it allow to disable(!) incoming(!) video completely?
README looks AI-generated, I wonder how much of the entire project was made the same way.
The CLAUDE.md is a bigger giveaway
I didn't dig too deeply, but saw a commit message written by Claude
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I use this a lot and it works well.
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?
Use this app to uninstall it https://freemacsoft.net/appcleaner/ it should remove all traces of the app from computer
I should complain on Hacker News more often. That worked! Finally. Thank you!
> What good has Microsoft done for the world other than digital pain and suffering?
Minesweeper was kinda fun.
growing up as a Mac user in the 80s and 90s I always found it a really dumb game.
I was damning with faint praise.
Clear the teams cache, it can persist after uninstall.
Alternative solution: Flee any company that uses Microsoft Teams.
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.)
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.
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.
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
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.
I don't see this behaviour at all, and I live in Teams on Windows, web and Android. It has improved over time.
This sounds wonderful, many of us just need to work somewhere and other things are more important than some of their unfortunate software choices.
The way the job market is right now, I wouldn't flee a company running MS-DOS.
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
The text copying is pretty much the only remaining issue I have with Teams, and it is so infuriating when you encounter it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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!
It's gotten so much better recently, and I used to be a Teams hater.
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.
I would prefer to have a job that pays me money than to not have to use Teams.
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.
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?
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
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.
Beeper mini.
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.
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.
Must be nice to be Teams' product manager and see this. /s
Copilot has neither eyes, nor feelings.
You wrongly assume that they care.
You think their boss reads HN?!
Why would you do this? What purpose does this serve other than to create additional misery and suffering in this world?
I’m sure if you think about it for more than 30 seconds you’ll figure it out
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.
Native applications are a scourge, if only from a security standpoint.