Comment by jacquesm
18 hours ago
The official client is absolutely terrible. But, I've found a much better solution: I tell all my customers Microsoft Teams doesn't work for us and they'll have to pick something else.
Kudos for at least trying to address this, MS should hang their head in shame, this is not the hardest problem to solve these days. If we could do it in 1995 they should be able to do it 30 years later.
From a UI perspective, Teams is terrible, but there is one thing it does well and that's large meeting calls. Microsoft knows their customers: large companies.
The boss doesn't see that you can't properly paste a piece of code in the chat, but he wants to make sure that everyone hears him at the annual talk. He wants it to connect to the company directory, make analytics, reflect the corporate hierarchy, make announcements, etc... He sees it as a one way, top down communication tool more than peer-to-peer, and for the former, Teams delivers. Developers hate it, but developers are not the ones who have the money and make these decisions.
Still, that's a thing I miss about Bill Gates's Microsoft. It was certainly evil (Embrace Extend Extinguish, the fight against free software, etc...), but at least, they actually cared about usability and developers, not just pleasing big company bosses.
Completely agreed. I sit in dismay, remembering the Microsoft I frowned upon back in the days as a Linux/FreeBSD user. But at least their software was accessible via keyboard and their translations were really good.
Fast forward to now, after being a dev on Windows for years and loving it, and now their UX is a joke. For example, to jump back and forth between chats, neither the back/forth mouse buttons nor any other key combo works on macOS. You have to click the navigation buttons in the symbol bar instead. Translations are AI-powered, and that shows. Also, Teams is dog slow, which I also count as a UX issue.
I remember working at MS a decade ago and how good out translation pipeline was. Tons of attention paid to cultural nuances even between different English dialects. We'd have separate translations for UK, US, AUS, and international English. We'd change not just words but the overall tone of messages based on the culture in different countries.
So much care, and the expertise and professionalism of the people doing the worn was amazing.
It’s sad to see the decline in the quality of desktop computing. I blame this on the rise of mobile apps and Web apps in the 2010s. It’s not that mobile apps and Web apps are inherently bad; that’s not the problem. The problems is that we have an entire generation of engineers who never learned desktop UI/UX conventions and principles.
To make matters worse, in an attempt to save on development costs, mobile and Web applications have been deployed on the desktop, with the justification that it’s better to have an app, even a shoddy one, than to not have one at all. What’s appropriate on a smartphone or a tablet may not be appropriate on a desktop, and vice versa. The Web never had a mechanism for enforcing UI/UX guidelines, similar to the MS-DOS and Apple II days of computing.
The sad thing is Microsoft and even Apple now have shoddy desktop apps, despite the fact they have the resources to make well-designed desktop apps, and that at one point they set standards for excellent desktop apps and conformed to them.
We had a sweet spot in the 2000s with Windows 2000/XP/7 and Mac OS X and their ecosystems of desktop applications. It’s been downhill since.
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> The boss doesn't see that you can't properly paste a piece of code in the chat
Of all my many gripes with Teams, it usually handles code surprisingly well. Single `inline` and triple backtick blocks usually render as you'd expect.
OneNote on the other hand doesn't support a code-block at all, and is worse (if you can believe it) than storing cli commands in Word docs.
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?
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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.
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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.
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It also doesn't use 1.5 CPU cores non-stop.
My experience is the complete opposite.
Granted I haven't tried O365 in about a year since it was so unusable in Firefox.
As far as teams goes, I use it in the same version chromium on the same OS on two different computers; one works fine most of the time (main issue is it sometimes switches the audio back to the first item listed by Linux, which is not my USB headset). The other computer is terrible. Somewhere between 4-48 hours it pops up a tiny (maybe 40px) banner at the top saying "you need to sign in again" meanwhile there are no notifications and any messages I send are silently queued with no obvious indication that they haven't been delivered. Before I figured this out, I was just randomly out of communication with my coworkers, with both sides thinking we were sending the other person messages that they were ignoring. Clicking the "sign in" button on the banner just seems to reload teams and doesn't even ask me to sign in.
I worked in an all Linux dev shop. Our Lead refused to install Electron apps and ran them in Chrome tabs instead. It just worked. I dont remember how we ran Teams back then though.
It works but it takes a long time to load.
I've got two customers that both use Slack for everything except calls. One does calls in Meet and the other one in Teams. I asked to the Teams one and they told me that Teams works for everybody every time. Slack sometimes has problems with the video or audio setup. Too bad, because huddles are only one click away.
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?
Techincally it works, but the UX is terrible. So many times I couldnt copy a message because of the stupid emojis popping up right below my mouse, so that you have opportunity to look dumb after sending a "heart" in a professional meeting about serious matter.
Also, it HAS to rename my files.
Also sending code barely works, and not for long messages
This is just on top of my head
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
> 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.
The problem is that it’s a perfectly fine video meeting application (although what sociopath decided entering a meeting unmuted was a proper default), but many orgs try to push it as their chat application too. The UX for that is awful. And for some of us that is the primary way we communicate. I started working from home in 2008, collaborating on code over Freenode long before that. Most eng teams I’ve been on these past 20 years coordinate on chat. It’s hard when the business people think Teams is fine and then the rest of us have to use busted software.
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.
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.
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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.
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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?
At least Slack knows about threading conversations.
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.
We use Citrix and Windows 11 in our work environment. I keep Teams open in Citrix so that I can copy links from the browser into the chat. The links then show the title for the link, I like that functionality. I also have it open on my Laptop as well (Windows 11) for doing calls and meetings. Our Citrix is slow, so I don’t do calls there. Fun thing is that often when I get a call in Teams it is automatically picked up on my laptop without me accepting it.. It is “auto-answer” functionality I tell the colleagues who don’t understand how it is possible that I pick up in 50 milliseconds :-). It is caused by Teams being open in 2 places. Weird.. Another weird issue I have with the 2 Teams instances being open is that when I get dragged into a group call and I answer, I’m in the call for 2 seconds and then the call gets disconnected. Then they try to call me again, I get disconnected again. Then I have to kill the Teams instance in Citrix to make it possible for them to add me to the call.. Another weird issue is that sometimes when I’m in a group call on my laptop and I try to look something up in my Citrix instance of Teams or even click in a chat thread, my call gets disconnected on the laptop..
Your technical work environment sounds horrible to me. Windows + Citrix is enough to send me screaming. Kudos that you pull through like that.
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.
Then again, what they did to Skype is a study case in how to destroy a platform users loved.
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.
Some of the audio stack is probably still from Skype.
I don't know. I use the Linux and Windows clients, and to me they feel the same. They're not great, but I wouldn't say one is worse.
In fact, I'd say all of the modern chat apps are pretty much equally terrible. They're all proprietary, bloated, web apps with terrible clients that people only use because they have to for work. Chat apps peaked in the early 2000s when the protocols were more open and you could use 3rd party apps like Trillian and Pidgin instead of the official clients.
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.
Yeah, but like is no one proud on that team to actually deliver something useful?
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>> 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.
> It works fine 19 times out of 20 at least.
But for something you use 3-5x a day, that is a noticeable problem every few days. Why it has such an awful reputation.
So so all of the hate is just due to some dropped calls? Realistically it isn't even that bad (likely more like 2% failure rate). For me, I use Teams but it isn't like I am in the application all day. If it were 10X better I wouldn't care very much - like MS word vs Google docs or whatever. I care a lot about text editors on the other hand.
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I used Teams in Firefox on Linux and didn't have any issues with it, other than it being generally slow and bad.
> 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.
> 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.
Same happens on the official app on windows 11 so the issue is not linux specific.
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.
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.
microsoft couldn't do it in 95 either
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?
upvoting out of principle