[m348e912]

>>If I were forced to use teams I would quit.

It's funny to hear this because if I were looking for a job one of the selling points for me would be if they used teams.

I'm on it all day, I present and run video meetings on it. I use it on different devices. It's not perfect by any means, but I'm confident that it will do what I need it to do.

My only guess is you're on a linux desktop and you don't use an enterprise deployment of teams and perhaps you're using the web version of the client. In that case, yes I feel for you.

[flappyeagle]

I'm on an M1 macbook. Teams is extremely bad. I don't know how to describe it tersely other than everything kinda sucks. I work remotely and take a lot of meeting, so it's like my office in a way... an office that's cramped, leaky, ugly, uncomfortable, and cold.

[markeibes]

I use it on an M1 Max Macbook Pro and it's the worst piece of software on it.

[mrtranscendence]

I use Teams on a relatively modern Intel MacBook Pro. My chief complaint is that it murders my battery -- I barely get two hours when I'm on Teams video calls. But there are other issues.

For example, sometimes the window just disappears when it's in the background. When that happens I don't get any notifications, so unless I notice that Teams has bugged out I'll miss when someone tries to contact me. And recently, video has become weirdly bugged -- I see people twitch around like I'm watching a bad horror movie, and sometimes they flash red. No idea what that's about but I can't seem to fix it. It's not going to kill me but it's uncomfortable to watch.

More minor, but search is a mess, and notifications aren't great.

Other than that I guess it's OK.

[mrtranscendence]

Oh, it also plays poorly with virtual desktops (or whatever the feature is called on MacOS). If I switch from the desktop with the Teams window to another desktop, then cmd-tab back to Teams, it will switch the active application to Teams but won't switch back to the desktop with the actual Teams window. This is infuriating.

It seems to have something to do with the fact that, when on a call, Teams is active in every desktop (with a stupid little video window). But it persists even when you're not on a call.

[blincoln]

I use enterprise Teams on a Windows 10 laptop and it is the worst overall chat/conferencing experience for me in over 25 years of technical work.

About the only thing I can say in its favour is that I've rarely had trouble with video or audio quality.

It is an unbelievable performance hog. It launches something like 8-10 processes, one of which defaults to running at above normal priority. Despite this, frequently text chat messages will lag ~30 seconds between notification and appearing in the actual chat window. Even clicking on UI elements like buttons will often have a lag of 5-10 seconds. If I'm on a video call, it uses more CPU than any other process, including my browsers (~50 tabs open across ~10 windows) and a Kali Linux VM running in VMware Workstation.

The UX is awful. For example, there is no way to permanently reorder the list of channels you're in (not even sorted alphabetically). It's always the order you joined them every time you start up Teams. My list of channels is something like 50 long, so I basically just have to search for the one I want, because the alternative is to scroll through the list and read every line.

There are bizarre bugs. Sometimes I'll join a video call, but it will be a "ghost call" where I can hear the participants, but there's no window for me to interact with, so all I can do is close Teams entirely and start over. Sometimes I won't be able to unmute myself, so everyone will wonder why I'm not responding. Today I saw a new one where random members of the call had their video feeds replaced with empty black space (no profile photo/letter).

It's unbelievable to me that I could use IRC, MSN Messenger, and any number of other chat apps on a PC 20+ years ago and get a snappy response time, and yet Teams still feels like it's mired in a swamp running on hardware that's something like 100x faster and with 20-50x the amount of RAM.

Something like 15 years ago, I was troubleshooting a SharePoint issue and discovered that even though it was using a SQL Server database to store everything, instead of taking advantage of the power of a good database design and platform, all of the kind of object affected by the problem were stored as enormous XML blobs inside a single column, with SharePoint doing a SELECT * and then acting as its own terrible inner faux-database layer. I have to imagine that Teams is a similar "don't ask how the sausage is made" kind of situation, where MS basically shipped an early prototype instead of productionizing it.

[jrochkind1]

> Today I saw a new one where random members of the call had their video feeds replaced with empty black space (no profile photo/letter).

Oh yeah, this has been happening to us lately. Quitting Teams (not just disconnecting from video meeting) and restarting seems to restore.

[xur17]

> My only guess is you're on a linux desktop and you don't use an enterprise deployment of teams

Is there an enterprise deployment of teams that makes it not suck on linux?