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.
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. It was anyway always completely useless for several reasons, in particular that it always stayed at 100% CPU.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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?
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?
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Teams doesn't work much better on Mac. It's easily the worst program I have to use.
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. It was anyway always completely useless for several reasons, in particular that it always stayed at 100% CPU.
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.
The Teams works well as a PWA on Ubuntu, everything works meeting ings chats etc etc.
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.
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...
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?
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 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
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.
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
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.
I use this a lot and it works well.
README looks AI-generated, I wonder how much of the entire project was made the same way.
The CLAUDE.md is a bigger giveaway
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 didn't dig too deeply, but saw a commit message written by 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?
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.
Clear the teams cache, it can persist after uninstall.
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?
Beeper mini.
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 think their boss reads HN?!
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 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.
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.
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.
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.