Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by thunfisch 1177 days ago
... and not a single mention of Linux. It's kind of sad to see, that Linux remains a step-child for MS Teams. My company forced the move from Slack to Teams, and effectively downgraded the entire experience of online collaboration for everyone. C-level moved "up" from S4B to Teams and called it amazing, while all the product teams and devs that were previously using Slack have lost a huge amount of online communication & culture due to the move. Of course that was attributed to "pandemic causing us to not be able to sit in a room together" - although I never did that even before, as I was a 100% remote worker already.

Aside from that - Teams on Linux has always been a mere afterthought, badly supported, important features intentionally cut/withheld, and sometimes not even kept up to date. I've moved away from the awfully broken Electron client to running the Teams website in Chromium App mode, in a bubblewrap container. It makes it a little bit less awful, but it's still painfully slow, buggy, and annoying to use.

I understand that with the intended complexity of various integrations, using a web platform might look like a win - but for me as a user, chatting with Teams feels multiple times slower than chatting on my old Pentium 120 MHz with Win98 with Java Applets. I'm all in for good integrations, but while WebView2 might bring some performance gains for Windows and MacOS, I'm afraid that we Linux users will never see a WebView2 version, and Teams will just get even more sluggish over time.

Would it be that hard to provide some native-ish baseline experience, and extend functionality for random integrations in places where it's actually needed? i.e. insert webviews where it makes sense, instead of hamstringing the entire application for that flexibility?

1 comments

Linux is just another way for Microsoft to make money.

They will never embrace it fully. It's a dish rag they wring out and use.