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MS Teams Linux client is being retired. To be replaced by a progressive web app
164 points by NGRhodes on Sept 1, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 168 comments
(Updated) Important upcoming changes to Microsoft Teams desktop client on Linux

Updated August 30, 2022: We are updating this message to indicate we will be retiring the Microsoft Teams desktop client on Linux in 90 days (early December). Please take action as appropriate for your organization.

We hear from you that you want the full richness of Microsoft Teams features on Linux such as background effects, reactions, gallery view, etc. We found the best way to act on this is to offer a Teams progressive web app (PWA) on Linux as a new feature of our current web client, which we’ll make available to our Linux customers in the coming months. PWA enables us to ship the latest Teams features faster to our Linux customers and helps us bridge the gaps that existed between the Teams desktop client on Linux and Windows. The PWA experience will be available on both Edge and Chrome browsers on Linux.

We will be retiring the Microsoft Teams desktop client on Linux in 90 days (early December), which is currently available in public preview. All users on the Microsoft Teams Linux desktop client will have to transition to the web or PWA version, which is where we will continue to invest our development resources. We are committed to helping all current customers on Linux start using the PWA app; we’ll publish guidance once we are closer to releasing this feature.

Teams PWA is an evolution of our Linux web experience - it offers the “best of the web with key functionalities of client”: zero-install, lightweight, and has a rich set of features. For example, the PWA version supports features such as:

Background blur and custom backgrounds Reactions and raise hand in meetings Large gallery and together mode PWA also provides desktop-like app features such as:

System notifications for chat and channel Dock icon with respective controls Application auto-start Easy access to system app permissions When will this happen?

We plan to make Microsoft Teams PWA on Linux generally available in the coming months.

How will this affect me?

If your users/administrators use the Microsoft Teams Linux desktop client, they either need to set up the Microsoft Teams PWA (when it is generally available) or use the Teams Linux web app to ensure business continuity.

What do you need to do to prepare?

To prepare, we recommend informing all your users about the upcoming changes, encouraging them to switch over to the PWA (when it is generally available) to get the latest features on Linux along with a desktop-like experience. Microsoft will publish a blog post about this change and how to install Teams as a PWA on Edge and Chrome once we are closer to making this feature generally available on Linux in the coming months.




The Teams webapp is by far the slowest and most buggy of any video chat solution clients have asked me to use.

In one browser my mic works, but I cannot see screens shared by other people. In another browser it is the reverse. Also it is designed for WebGL which is not available on my OS and the software fallback takes 30 seconds to load and is slow as hell on a beefy 32 core Threadripper.

Jitsi, Meet, and others work flawlessly by comparison.


That, and also invitation system is a trash fire. URLs are long and gnarly, there is no alternative "meeting number" that could be spelled/typed in, then there is this "context" thing that changes based on attendee being internal/external to the org. And of course you can't join as guest, only with your full AD name/email. Say hello to phishing and other scams.


They did add meeting numbers recently at least.


> In one browser my mic works, but I cannot see screens shared by other people. In another browser it is the reverse.

perhaps joining calls from a convex combination of browsers might give you the least-worst results


Good riddance. Can microsoft retire windows and mac apps now as well, please?

Seriously, I see zero point of shipping old/buggy chrome bundled with the app (aka "electron") for purpose of accessing some centralized service. PWA is the way to go here, yes.


Teams for Mac refused to let me upload a file this morning, and I learned you can't use the Teams webapp from Safari unless you globally turn off "Prevent cross-site tracking." Yeah, no thanks.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/safari-browser-su...


Yeah, that "cross-site tracking" thing is a side effect of microsoft's habit as dumb as inexplicable. Teams webapp (all O365 webapps, really) load from like 7 different domains. I can understand 2 (CDN+API), but that's way too many. No wonder tracking protection kicks in.


that's weird though (in the CDN case) because one of the primary reasons to use another domain is to avoid people sending you cookies because it's useless data for static assets.


> I learned you can't use the Teams webapp from Safari unless you globally turn off "Prevent cross-site tracking." Yeah, no thanks

It's the same in Edge on Windows lol. Their own shit doesn't work on their own shit.


Well they will be using Edge Web View 2, their homegrown electron "alternative". What is puzzling is that they didn't even bother to port it to Mac or Linux before choosing to move away from electron.

So edgeview2 is basically windows only for now, and any future port will mean they'll have to maintain multiplatform support. And guess this announcement implies that they won't port it to Linux. But why do away with the "free" multiplatform compatibility of electron? The official reason was for increased performance, but it's hard to see how electron was the bottleneck considering how badly Teams run even compared to your average electron app. I mean Microsoft has built the best performing electron app I've ever used, vscode!

I'm probably missing something though, and I'm sure there are tons of good reasons for going the edge webview route, but it's still pretty confusing to me!


Teams currently uses electron, not wv2. Wv2 is better, but pwa is best. Wv2 doesnt support notifications and a bunch of other stuff


Yes but they are moving towards edge wv2 for their next big product update, right? Did they end up giving up on that?

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/teams...

https://twitter.com/TandonRish/status/1408085784016539653?


Doubly confusing then, as they've released Edge for Linux, no?


Yep, and edge webview2 uses edge for the most part. Yet there's something specific to the edge webview2 runtime that makes it hard to port even if edge itself is already available on mac/linux. I think it's because it uses some windows specific APIs to expose functionalities that aren't available to regular webviews (maybe the optional process and runtime sharing?)

They were planning on maybe releasing the linux port around the end of 2021, as they were prioritizing the mac port first.

But I don’t think even the mac port has been released yet... So it kind of makes sense for the Teams team (ha!) to just not bother with a linux release if the runtime they are developing on isn't even on the release roadmap yet. Though I guess that makes the switch from electron even more confusing.

https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/645


Microsoft not shipping a native Windows client is an extremely un-Microsoft thing, and it sends extremely mixed signals about the desktop.

Edit: baffling downvote?


Yes, Office nowadays is also heavily invested into using Webviews, and then there is all that buzz about hybrid apps with Blazor.

Every time I watch the WinUI community talk it seems like trying to sell us the platform, after all the mismanagment with UWP.

The sad part is when asked about why features X, Y, Z from Forms or WPF still aren't coming in WinUI, they mostly react as if hearing about the said feature for the first time. That is how well the team knows the frameworks they are trying to replace.


Yeah, I had to research this for work purposes recently and ended up using the Nokia "burning platform" image in the presentation. Microsoft got really badly punched in the face by the failure of Windows Phone and UWP, and they've not managed to backport it successfully to the desktop.

WinUI3 good news: it's open source! You can see it on github.

Bad news: it's only just made 1.0, and because it's on github you can see that the team devoted to it is absolutely tiny.


Not a Teams user. You're telling me the windows Teams client is built with electron rather than native? That is extremely telling.


It's much better than the web version though, which feels like a degraded experience in almost every aspect.

Also what is up with Microsoft's redirect-through-15-domains authentication. Completely unreasonable for anyone that has their browser set up securely.


15 domains.

Really?


It's hard to define what "native" even means on Windows these days. For a while, writing WinRT apps in HTML/JS was an officially blessed thing, for example.


I can't find any reason other than "we will only code things once and run everywhere". Considering the scale of users, a native client is a no brainer

For a while I have contemplated creating a lightweight native version of Teams. According to the Teams API it should be possible, I believe

It can simply be c#, no need to go any deeper. But it would be a huge boost in performance


I would love ANY alternative to Microsoft's Teams app!


I'm working on a vanilla JS web app alternative if you're interested, OperCom. You can see its current status at [1] and keep updated at [2]

[1] https://blog.opercom.co.uk/posts/news-13-08-22/

[2] https://www.opercom.co.uk/contact


At this point you discover that there are at least three different options for C# UI, all of which have significant drawbacks. The performance of a WinForms Teams UI would be fantastic, though.


Agree on WinForms, but why wouldn't WPF also be fine? Granted it leaks a bit of memory here and there, but not much


Development of WPF was abandoned more than decade ago.


I thought WPF was the de facto current standard for Windows apps and everything else (MAUI etc) is too experimental and hardly promising

MS certainly is using WPF in some areas (Dynamics 365 client framework comes to mind)


Desktop apps died more than 1 decade ago. Most people's don't install any program on their computer outside of Chrome.


Everyone I know with a desktop computer installs & uses tons of programs that aren't Chrome. And most of them aren't programmers or other flavors of computer nerd.

The non-nerds also absolutely notice when some stupid Electron chat app makes their laptop hot and takes their battery life from 16 hours to 2.5 hours (ahem, Discord when using voice and/or video chat). Proponents of that tech claim normal users don't notice, but 1) they definitely, 100% do, and 2) more than one might think are even able to figure out which app, specifically, is responsible, not just "my machine's slow and battery's dying fast and I don't know why" (it's usually not exactly rocket science).


Are there actually genuine stats around this? There's no question there's a class of users these days that have limited use for apps other than their browser (and maybe Adobe Reader for signing/ form-filling PDFs, presumably that will be possible via a browser plugin soon enough too). Those users are presumably not HN readers though (there's at least 20 desktop apps I rely on every day, and another 20 I use weekly or more).

Edit: the Adobe website claims you can do form fill and sign of PDFs from within a browser, but it's never worked for me. Recently had to initial every page of a 78-page PDF, which my fairly beefy machine struggled a bit with (it was truly painful on my partner's lower spec machine), I'm curious how feasible that would be in a browser.


You're kidding, right? There are a lot of Linux users who are screaming for system tray support on many apps. My college is totally on board with Office 365, but I haven't owned Windows in over twenty years. I inherited a Windows desktop in my office, but it mostly stays powered off in a corner.

My system tray has Slack, Discord, Teams, and VLC pretty much all the time. My taskbar often gets rather loaded with how I switch between workflows, and I've already got the Outlook PWA stuck there doing nothing. I was really hoping I could eventually have a native Outlook electron app (I feel a bit iffy installing a third party solution), but instead I'm gaining another app that sits there 90% of the time doing nothing.


More than one decade ago was, at best, 2011. There were plenty of desktop apps back then. Most messengers were real desktop apps, then, for example.


Most people didn't have a general-purpose computer thirty years ago. We are going back to that state of things. Those who want one, then and now, will have one.


Wrong.


I'm surprised they didn't say "why don't you just use Windows with WSL? We're trying our best to make sure your IT department forbids you from using anything else anyway"


I have already worked at least one software company which developed Linux-only _desktop_ software (i.e. which used some X11 toolkit) while literally using Windows-only development machines, and Office, Outlook, Teams. (This was before WSL).


I have worked at a software consulting company that worked (for other companies, mostly) on C++/Qt software that was only made available for Mac and Windows. Most developers were developing on Linux, though.


This bizarre mismatch still happens in some companies, post-desktop, and the impact can be worse than everyone merely being less-productive.

It can also be a symptom of other organizational dysfunction.

For tech companies, especially startups, it's something we should consider before joining: how does the company determine the tools/infrastructure that engineering and production use, and what are the current determinations?


Would have quit on day 1 without question. That is pretty nuts.


The Windows Teams client is also crap.


There's a small but non-trivial number of Microsoft employees who only use Linux.


With the InTune/device attestation stuff they will feel the heat to move to Windows as well.


Microsoft has a “secret” Intune Deb for Ubuntu, but I must admit I haven’t tested it.

You can see it here: https://ubuntu.pkgs.org/20.04/microsoft-prod-amd64/intune-po...


Yeah, I teach a class about operating systems. It's supposed to be developer-oriented. I remember the first time we couldn't run VirtualBox. I filed a ticket, and waited, and waited. Finished teaching the class, bumped the ticket. A year later, the class runs again and we still can't get anything done. Department chair and I have a meeting with the IT director, and he pushes to use WSL.

I'm like, uh, really? No. By this point I've had to "teach out of the book" so much I'm used to it, COVID has happened so half my class is working from home anyways... I pretty much just work around my IT department any chance I can. I bought a System76 laptop just so I don't have to request software upgrades and installs every other semester.


I'm quite impressed at how nice WSL is. It's very snappy, great internetworking with the host Windows, and is kept up-to-date. The only thing it's missing, for me, is nl80211 support (I do wifi) and usb-serial. I do a lot of console app dev in WSL regardless.


I think it's quite crap actually.

If you don't have IPv6 on your network it just makes an address up and then tries to route everything through it because IPv6 has precedence.

And of course the sysctl to disable IPv6 doesn't work under WSL. It took me 30 mins just to fix that and that was straight out of the box.

I don't know why I'd want all the windows baggage on my Linux laptop.


WSL1 was so much better. WSL2 appears to simply be an effort for Microsoft to showcase Hyper-V and it has all the issues associated with virtualization - despite Microsoft's best attempts at blending the two environments.


WSL1 was almost useless on anything that did a lot of file I/O (so, installing or updating packages for a development environment took ages). This was not fixable given how Windows handles the file system and as I understand it this was the main drive to move to WSL2


I think it was only if you were interacting with the Windows host FS, operations within the Linux fs were fine with performance. I would be surprised if there wasn't a solution to that they could have worked towards.

Anyway, doesn't WSL2 mount Windows volumes over Samba?


WSL actually mounts over 9P from Plan 9 fame. fwiw I remember WSL1 being dog slow on file IO perf.


WSL might be integrated nicely, but then you still have to deal with Windows. No thanks.

A few years ago I got a new laptop, and booted windows so I could download a Debian installer. The first-time Windows setup was full of telemetry and other crap that would have needed to be turned off, and then I immediately started seeing ads for Edge and other crap showing up. It was disgusting.


The WSL instance is a special kind of VM, in a virtual network that gets masqueraded onto whatever network the host is on, yet nowhere in Windows can you manage this, for example to set the subnet the WSL runs in. Sometimes you have to reboot to get DNS going again. I'd call that not great.


you can normally just disable/reenable the virtual network switch to fix that. Not elegant but does the job:

> netsh interface set interface "vEthernet (WSL)" disable

then run again with enable.


You'll be even more impressed when you see Windows running on Linux on KVM with hardware passthrough, because that's what WSL is, a glorified VM with hardware-passthrough.


Honestly PCI pass through would probably make it perfect for me. Pass through a usb controller or whatever other weird device you need


Well USB in general is missing, and the workarounds don't always work (or in my case just plain don't work)


Corp propaganda. No one wants extra features. We want basic features working. Client is a hot mess.


Product managers are politicians, and politicians gain popularity and power inaugurating new things, not maintaining things that already exist.


Hence android pay... err android wallet... err pay.. err google wallet... err google pay.. err google wallet again.. err now google pay again?

Maybe one day google wave.. or google plus... or google buzz will take off.


Teams has been transformative in the way I work with my team over the last few years, and the pace of development is impressive.

But…

I cannot understand the absence of core functionality like copy & paste from chats. You can select a few messages (maybe a pageful) but there is no way to take a copy of a whole chat. You can’t print it. You can’t export it. Eventually it just gets lost in deep history, and you can only find it if you remember which keywords were in the text.

We resort to filing screenshots, which seems ridiculous.

There used to be dozens of threads on UserVoice crying out for this feature, but they all got wiped when the Teams team stopped using that. At the time the statement was “this is on our backlog” and it had been that way for several years.

I’d love an explanation of why.


> Teams has been transformative in the way I work with my team over the last few years

I've found it to be a big downgrade from slack.

How has of been transformative for you?


It was transformative _because_ it was a downgrade.


I'll speak of the things I like about teams

Granted, I've not professionally used slack so I can't say if it's much better.

- Teams integration with outlook is the best. Makes meetings with remote team members really slick.

- Teams video chat (at least for a smaller group of people) is way better than solutions like zoom. It's just super convenient to be able to do a video or voice call with someone to work something out.

- The ability to create small group chats with people on the fly is awesome. When we need a 1 off async convo with the right people it's easy enough to just add them to a chat, name it something useful, and be off.

- Because video chat has a chat, it's pretty easy to do a message where you can write something without interrupting the current conversation. That also doesn't go away as soon as the meeting ends (ala zoom).


The things that's been transformative for me is that 95% of the external organisations I interact with have and use Teams. I cannot understate the power of broad uptake.

It's not a feature, or a piece of technical excellence, it's just that it is pervasive.


And that’s mainly a pricing issue. Teams is included in 365, webex charges insane rates nowadays.


That last point, persistent meeting chats, is really nice


Yup, particularly if you have a series of meetings (for example, standup) then the chat for yesterday's standup ends up being the same chat for today's standup.

Adds a lot of continuity to repeated meetings and can serve as an adhoc meeting notes location.


Being able to call someone on audio or video, at any moment, without organizing a meeting, is a killer feature. I wish Google Meet allowed that.


In Google Chat, you can attach a Meet invite to a message for an impromptu meeting.

Personally I am glad that people can't just call me up. I would rather be asked over chat first.


Probably coming from email, not Slack.


> Teams has been transformative in the way I work with my team over the last few years

Same, its been a great way to avoid meetings that should have been an email.


I think it is because of the retention policy many companies have: after a certain amount of time (3 months, 1 year, 3 years are most common that I've seen) data has to be permanently deleted. This means if you make copy/paste/save/backup harder, there is less chance people will do that.

In my company messages in Teams disappear after a few weeks, emails after 3 years. You never know when your chat telling someone the app you just put in production is not fully tested and not ready and that chat will end up as evidence in court. Companies want to protect themselves, this is why they shred all data as soon as possible.


It also doesn't have some core features any multi-user voice chat client should have: change the volume of specific users and LOCALLY not GLOBALLY mute a user. Today I was on a call where one member was incredibly quiet and there was no way to adjust that (he called via actual phone). Teamspeak and Discord have had these features forever.


(self-promotion ahead)

Since the Microsoft Teams client is well known for being quite frankly, terrible, as many have pointed out in this thread, I am working on my own, alternative Teams client: OperCom.

I'm building it as a simple, vanilla JS web application, in a SaaS model (since I need to keep bending to Microsoft's will). The Teams API isn't great to reverse engineer, but it's do-able and has been done (partially) before, but never to the extent required to create a full-featured app.

If anybody's interested, you can see its current status at [1] and keep updated with its progress at [2].

[1] https://blog.opercom.co.uk/posts/news-13-08-22/ [2] https://www.opercom.co.uk/contact


No need to reverse engineer, Teams has a public API https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/teams-a...


Microsoft Graph requires the organisation administrator to enable extra user permissions or to add an app to allow users to use this, whereas by reverse engineering users don't need organisation administrator permission.


Org-level admin requirements are what stopped me from pursuing my own solution. Hopefully your approach will have better luck.


That's a shame. What was your product, and did you have any troubles with reverse engineering or did you not consider it?


I have used https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux before, it is quite a nice experience (better than the official app!) and it might be something suitable when the web client is broken with no clear reason why.


Interesting it states it is in maintenance mode due to there being a MS Linux client but just had a release 2 hours ago. A bit shooting itself in the foot. Will give it a try. The last time I saw it, I skipped it because I though it was obsolete.


Screen sharing even works on Wayland, far ahead from the official client.


I used it for a bit due to issues signing in with the proper Linux version.

It had all sorts of issues with lag, sometimes buttons wouldn't respond for tens of seconds.

Once I got Linux teams working again it was my much better.


What horrible software... I switched to running Teams in Edge on Linux awhile ago to get camera blur and it's just as bad as the native client was...


> We hear from you that you want the full richness of Microsoft Teams features on Linux such as background effects, reactions, gallery view

Hum... As a Windows Teams user, can you remove those features from the Windows client too?


To be fair, I would much prefer a sandboxed webapp then giving Microsoft full access to my system.


But only if you're willing to use Chrome, as I believe Edge requires root permissions to install.


Anyone know if Firefox will be allowed for calls before this switch, or will I still be limited to chrome(ium) browsers?


MS Teams works in Firefox, but glitches often. For example sharing my screen didn’t work well, chats were not showing latest messages, stuff like that. Enough to join a call though.

Much better in Chromium.


MS Teams in Firefox is impressively gimped.

Even video display from the webcam doesn't work.

From what I know it's the only video chat program to have an issue with that, jitsi/google meet/zoom web all work fine.


All office365 is essentially unusable in firefox. For example Outlook365 has a race condition where if you are typing in an e-mail and it pops up a suggestion, in the time before the popup appears, the keystrokes are treated globally, rather than going to the text editor, potentially executing commands and definitely leaving your e-mail a non-sensical mess.


Frankly, I'd prefer things like this. After the Zoom security issues came to light, I'd much prefer web apps over native apps, assuming the web apps can be made to be performant on Firefox. The fewer closed-source programs running on my computer, the better.


If only Firefox had support for PWAs on Desktop.


It does


May I refer you to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1682593


Interesting decision to shut the software down before the replacement is available to be downloaded.


We regret that you will need to wait to experience the full richness of Microsoft Teams features on Linux such as background effects, reactions, gallery view, etc. Please go fuck yourself until we decide it is ready.


Wow good to see MS commenting directly to users in HN now. Nice work MS.


The current software is on par with the current web version, which for me is OK. Yes, it could be better. I am glad it's being worked on.


The replacement will be available "in coming months" and the app will be maintained until December (and probably work until 2023), so the two will likely overlap while a simpler Web app is already available today.

Where do you see a problem?

I use MS Teams (Preview) on Linux. It's good enough for chat, doco sharing and other stuff it does. I don't give a crap about galleries, reactions and whatnot.


Wait. I have two different team accounts, and you can switch from the app itself but it takes time and you don't receive notifications from the unused account, which makes it useless. I also don't have it as a web tab because there are issues with calls and sharing screens this way.

So instead I have two team apps installed. One from flatpack and the other from the gnome store (or something like that, don't remember the exact stores). And they work great! Well, they work as awful as the teams app work, but simultaneously without any issue at all.

With the PWA can you have multiple independent instances? Please tell me yes...


I don't know if chrome supports anything like Firefox's separate profiles or multi-account-conntainers, but if it does, that should allow it.


Disclaimer: I'm currently part of Tandem.

Building a multi platform video conferencing app that is also stable and performant is extremely challenging. I can understand Microsoft's decision. That said, it's unfortunate that Linux users aren't going to have access to a desktop client anymore.

If you're looking for a new video conferencing tool, check out www.tandem.chat. We support linux/mac/windows (along with a web app) and we're built from the ground up for hybrid and remote first teams.

We're happy to extend an HN discount to any interested teams or answer any questions. Just email me at akash@tandem.chat.


Good, the current client auto starts on boot even though I'm not signed in. I've got to close 3 windows to get the thing to go away every time.


Yeah, classic Microsoft. Just autostart the thing so it "starts fast" later if/when it is actually needed. Never mind that the corresponding system resources could be used for something better. I uninstalled that POS and just use MSFT Edge for Linux (yes, seriously - it's basically non-Snap Chrome on Kubuntu) to join Teams video conferences.


I had to resort to chmod 400 on the autostart file to prevent ms teams from writing to that file


This is a load of bull crap from MS (I am fine with a PWA though). Teams is built atop electron. They purposefully kept the Linux version crappy for some reason. Possibly because, if they do one app for Linux, they might have to make other apps as well. Microsoft loves Linux my ass.


Lots of vitriol in this thread. Wow.

I'm grateful that Microsoft is giving Linux desktop a shot. Thanks for remembering us! (No sarcasm. I'm really impressed at how well Office works in Firefox-Linux.)


They're not. They're basically giving up and pointing to the web app that has always existed.


That's fine? The alternative is a shitty Electron app that won't bother conforming with desktop standards. If Microsoft is giving me the option between a frying pan and a fire, I'll take their olive branch.

On your other hand, apps like Discord are completely broken on modern Wayland systems. Discord's team never bothered to fix it, so now the only "native" way to use Discord is in Chromium. You could characterize that as a regression, but I'm perfectly happy with fully featured webapps as an alternative to misbehaving native apps.


The alternative would be a proper electron app.

MS can do it. Look at VS Code.

It's strange how they make some of the very best electron apps and also some of the worst (teams sucks on windows and Mac too and I don't see how their new edge-electron will fix that because it's also just a rebadged chrome just like electron)

The problem with teams isn't electron. It's the project management that prioritizes new features over making the existing ones work smoothly. The web version won't solve this as it's simply the same thing.


There's nothing proper about electron.

By itself it is already a huge suid executable that is almost impossible to verify. The MS idea of it is also a huge suid executable that you must download as a binary from MS and is contractually prohibited from verifying.


FWIW, VS Code doesn't really work on Wayland either. For many people it still links against outdated Electron, which means a lot of Wayland-native features are broken out-of-the-box.

I don't disagree that native apps should be a goal, but what does it matter with a video call app? Even Apple knew they had to throw in the towel here, Facetime can call direct-to-web now. Arguably, Microsoft's reluctance to make a good Skype webapp could be cited as one of the reasons for it's demise. Who knows, maybe we'd all be Skyping people still if Microsoft didn't wait until 2019 for a truly nice PWA. It won't save Teams as a product, but it would be a fine way to salvage it as an application.

If you want an attractive groupware tool, it has to work on everyone's system. If you want an attractive IDE/text editor, it has to be the best for that specific system. These two goals, markets and products are completely distinct. By recognizing this dichotomy, I think they're strengthening their product lineup.


Sadly they know their market - some very senior staff where I work were gushing over that newish feature to make people look like they are sitting in seats.

Meanwhile something useful like maybe caching the stupid emoji and reaction images so they don't lag every time isn't fixed.


Oh yes the "together mode". We tried that out once and it was sluggish and didn't add much. I haven't seen it used in the whole last year.

But you're right. The saying is true. "Microsoft is better at talking to your boss than you are."


Firefox on Wayland works fine for me, even for screen sharing. Try it with `MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 firefox`.


and how is that supposed to be a negative thing?

At most, we got one electron app that can get rid off, while at the same time get a guarantee to have the same feature as other systems.


No matter what Linux setup I've had over the last years, at some point either my webcam or sound input/output will break. Either permanently from an update or randomly during meetings. Restarting the apps and possibly reconnecting the hardware usually fixes it, maybe a restart.

There's this uncertainty that's big enough for me to stick to a Macbook when working.


I've seen the Teams client get confused about which sound device to use when connecting or disconnecting USB headsets or speakers. That seems to get fixed by switching sound input/output back and forth but it can be a bit of a hassle.

Other than that, I haven't seen significant sound or video issues during meetings either on my personal or work devices, and it would seem to be specific to Teams. My recent experience using a Linux desktop for work is only from the last few months, though.

As always with Linux and peripherals, your mileage will probably depend a lot on the hardware.


Hopefully this means it stops prompting me to open links to other channels or comments via xdg-open'ing the desktop app, with no way to make it default to opening them in the website instead.


I had to switch over to running Teams in Edge because it was barely functional otherwise. The only thing I run on edge though is Teams so really barely a change for me.


Please, for the love of all that is pure, just make Teams a native Windows app instead of this Chromium/Electron crap that feels out of place on any platform, not to mention being dog slow.

And please leave Outlook alone. Don't even think about turning it into a junky cross platform web-ish app.


If this web app is less of a resource hog than the Teams app on the Mac, I'll switch to it in a heartbeat. Between Teams and Outlook, M$ consumes over one GB of my mac's RAM. If a browser's memory footprint grows by less than that when running those apps (unavoidable, where I work), that'd be a big win over the current status quo, IMHO.


What's the source for this story please?


I’m an admin for our organisation’s Microsoft 365 account and while I haven’t checked the notices recently, the tone of this is consistent with the “admin only notices” on the admin website.


Is there a link to an official announcement? I can't seem to find one.


I’m an admin for our organisation’s Microsoft 365 account and while I haven’t checked the notices recently, the tone of this is consistent with the “admin only notices” on the admin website.


will it be able to show more than 4 others in a video chat at once? which seems to be another strange limitation of the Linux "teams" client.


Arg.

As many issues as the Linux version had, using the web version was worse.

I guess I shouldn't have expected from to actually follow throughon Teams for Linux.


Oh no, how terrible.

Anyway.

(It never even worked)


Not even just an electron Linux app?


That's what the existing Linux app is.


Are they that incompetent, or that malicious? Slack, Discord, etc all seem to have Electron-based apps in Linux that work just fine.

If they gave two shits about Linux, this would be working just fine. Now they're gonna push Linux users to use Edge, then probably abandon that pile.


Have you looked at any version of Teams? They are clearly incompetent.


Incompetent.

The Slack and Discord apps for Windows and Mac are also fine, where the Teams Electron-based client also sucks.


They have switched/are switching from electron to edge web view 2, which hasn't been ported to Linux yet. So that's probably why they had to trash the Linux app


And probably won’t.

I’m expecting [no hard evidence to this] the full Office will be on top of Edge’s Webview2 soonish.


What will happen to the Ubuntu snap package, will it be update to a web-app?


Disappointing to say the least


Microsoft Teams is one of the worst desktop apps I've used - on Windows and Mac.

You can see how it's built on layers and layers of badly designed compatibility layers and bad engineering decisions.

Massive CPU hog, unacceptable side effects (disconnecting Bluetooth devices), super laggy UI and overall poor UX are the headlines.

I decided to invest in an alternative VC platform for my business because it was that bad.


No surprise it came about from an internal hackathon at Microsoft.

Just take some Sharepoint and Exchange sprinkle over some Electron dust and you have a new platform.

Yes it is a pile of dung like Lotus Notes but fortunately for them Covid came out at the same time and customers needed a WFH solution that would not cost $$$.


I run into so many issues when trying to do video calls and screen share. Random disconnects, random program crashes, extreme latency, distorted video, ect. It is really frustrating when your company uses it for an internal chat/meeting solution.


I think the chat function is probably even worse than the video calling.

It just feels brittle and flaky and awkward. Even small things like trying to insert an image often won't work because the format is unsupported so you have to screenshot the image first.

In 2022 there is no excuse to not support all the common image formats, it's not hard


My teams also likes to go to "sleep" on my machine and just ignore incoming messages. I am embarrassed to get the email from exchange that I've missed a message in teams.

This is on a machine that is dedicated to teams and has nothing else running on it. It's got it's own monitor, is always in the foreground, and is something I can always see from my desk.

That, and my calendar no longer shows the time bar. So, I can see all my meetings, but I have to guess based on distance where in the day it's actually scheduled.

It's most definitely anti-productive to be using this.


I personally like how you go to make a call to someone, and it appears to connect and after 10 second of silence it throws an error and you have to call again.

Sure is a step forward from the 90s with digital desk phones where you just pressed a speed dial and connected instantly.


Mine goes to "sleep" too. I've got the latest client version running on MacOS. If I receive any messages while my computer is idle, even for a minute, they don't refresh on screen or alert in any way. They wont' appear until I jiggle the cursor a bit.


I've had the same. When I was using Teams for many meetings I would restart the desktop app every few hours to try and prevent these kind of issues. Not unusual for me to restart it after every meeting.


I've been on both Intel and M1 MacBook Pro's for years - I've never experienced those kind of problems. I'm a heavy user of Teams with (unfortunately) 5 hours of video calls daily.


> VC platform

I've always associated VC with venture capital... VC as videoconferencing threw me for a loop real quick


I was working for a Venture Capital firm at the time, and it was during COVID when everything was remote so it was a VC platform for our VC to do VCing!


I think VC is discord lingo for "Voice Channel"


Teams is a cancer. It is the worst windows program i ever worked with.


Second only to Outlook...


As much as i dislike Teams (and other Microsoft products), i have to say that the most recent version of Outlook (on desktop) is actually not bad. I've also heard folks speak highly of outlook web, but i rarely use it. Given the choice, I still prefer Thunderbird personally (on linux). But for many folks - especially lay people who happen to use Windows - i just recommend desktop outlook (and remind them to make sure they keep up with their system updates and MS Defender and other such security updates), and then call it a day.


Not sure why Outlook gets hate - its pretty powerful with its rules engine and has keyboard shortcuts for everything.

Can only assume you are on Mac where Outlook is a fisher price knockoff for some reason.


Outlook at least offers good performance. The ui could be better. On the other hand teams takes more resources than excel, my ide and browser with 100 tabs.


Last i used outlook on mac/windows feels native and fast


Outlook on Mac overrides Ctrl-A and Ctrl-E to not go to the beginning or end of the line. It's not serious software.


Yes, but the outlook web version is quite usable


And Windows


> We hear from you that you want the full richness of Microsoft Teams features on Linux such as background effects, reactions, gallery view, etc.

Just to be clear, we don't want any of your shit, let alone the full shit.


"Please don't fulminate."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


Talk for yourself.

Blurring the background is great for privacy. Reactions are silly but who cares. Gallery view has its uses in large meetings.


I want people to be able to read the titles on the spines of the carefully curated books I never read on my giant bookshelf in the background.


I also appreciate the background blurring of the native Windows app. The background of my office is a daybed/ couch, which can seem less professional than I'd prefer.


I just wish they improved temporal stability or gave us some tuning knobs. Things like hair, microphone wires and chair backs flickering in and out of existance is not something I can deal with while paying attention to a meeting.


You wouldn't use Teams if you cared about privacy. It's not the other people on the call you need the blur the background from.


It's on my job laptop I don't care. It's my company's problem at this point.

The people working with me as way more power and impact over my life than Microsoft and two wrongs don't make a right. For example if they see I'm selling stuff that might mean I have financial problems which can lead to prejudice and and less powerful position during negotiations.




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