4 ms·

Same, love Zulip but slack seems too entrenched at the moment. I'm hoping that OSS communities continue adopting it and using it instead of slack though.

by pm90 5y ago

sho_hn 5y ago
Meanwhile in Europe, where Slack never made much of a dent, Teams seems to be eating everything. ... which is frustrating, because its Linux desktop app is still quite poor and buggy in the basics.
- sandermvanvliet 5y ago
  I might be living in a different Europe than you but from what I see around my Slack is very pervasive and Teams is only used for video meetings because companies are already on office365. Nothing but hate for the chat/collaboration features…
  - trulyme 5y ago
    There seem to be quite a few Europes around. The one I live in uses mostly Zoom, with some Teams, Skype, Slack and even Jitsi thrown in the mix. Yeah, Teams is the worst of them in every dimension.
    - sho_hn 5y ago
      We used to be on Zoom for video meetings, then it lost favor due to fears of industrial espionage (the encryption crisis, etc.) and via Office 365, Teams snuck up. Initially as a Zoom replacement only for video meetings, too, but lately folks seem to be discovering the other functionality and it's creeping in. Atlassian (Confluence/JIRA) otherwise.
      - trulyme 5y ago
        Not a fan of Zoom myself, just - it seems to be used quite a lot around me. For me Jitsi is king for video conferencing. Sorry about Jira. :)
        sho_hn 5y ago
        The condolences are appreciated ... :-) Zoom's ugly as hell, but the Linux client has long been fairly reliable. Teams meanwhile is plagued by issues that don't seem to affect some other Electron-based apps or Chromium. During meetings it'll start out fine, then a minute in it'll suddenly use microphone. Opening any settings views tends to knock audio out of working state, too. Their official forums are full of threads on this, and support people suggesting crazy mitigations such as running it as root (admin user). The most recent release seems to be from September 2021, which is positively ancient for something based on a browser engine and using it to display complex content from remote hosts.
        adhesive_wombat 5y ago
        Not least, it doesn't seem to allow include Yubikey access which is a bit of bummer when that becomes a company wide thing. Then again Microsoft sites don't seem to work with security keys in Firefox either.
    - cyberpunk 5y ago
      I actually preferred teams to slack+zoom last few times I had to use it at a client. On MacOS it behaves pretty ok. Once you get used to the weird double text box.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    It really depends on which company you're in. Big companies where IT is considered a cost center and day-to-day users have no say in their tools will be using Teams, partly because they have no choice but also because for a lot of them the standard is already Windows and "Skype For Business" and they legitimately don't know how much better other tools are. In smaller companies where day-to-day users have a say in their tools, Teams would absolutely not fly, especially when said users most likely have experience with better tools such as Slack.
    - XorNot 5y ago
      If I'm being honest, Teams and Slack are both about as bad as each other. Threading in Slack in particular is so bad as to be an active productivity killer.
- nseggs 5y ago
  Not unlike the Windows version it seems
- wellthisisgreat 5y ago
  Team is horrendous. Literally the worst group chat there is
  - cyberpunk 5y ago
    You totally missed hipchat, Skype for business and mattermost then?
    - wellthisisgreat 5y ago
      Hipchat yes, but Mattermost didn’t really leave that bad of an impression. A bland SaaS chat. Teams however… the search functionality where you can find the message but can’t jump to it so that you can see the rest of the conversation. I actually scrolled up for some 5 minutes non-stop once trying to get to the conversation like that
      - hallway_monitor 5y ago
        I don't know how long ago you used teams, but that feature has been active for a while now. Since that was your main complaint, maybe you will like it now.
        wellthisisgreat 5y ago
        that was the cherry on top / the straw that broke the camel's back. Overall sluggishness and long loading times were probably the main problem. Zulip seems to be the endgame team messenger for us. Once you embrace the thread-first paradigm the old-school Slack/etc. single-thread approach is just too noisy.
- walrus01 5y ago
  teams is also an absolute CPU and memory hog on MacOS, even worse than slack, if that's possible.
  - cyberpunk 5y ago
    I guess it depends how much utter nonsense is going on in your slack. A quiet (?) teams seems to behave better than the absolute crapshow of slack 'apps' at my current gig. All that being said, I do kinda like the outlook calendar app, means I never have to go to office.com anymore ;)
    - walrus01 5y ago
      if you want to see something amazing watch the CPU usage when somebody posts a high-framerate animated GIF into a slack channel, it can suck down 70% CPU usage and a massive amount of battery on almost any laptop. The idea that a primarily text based chat client can consume 70% CPU on a quad-core, 10th gen core i7 is amazing.
- weisk 5y ago
  Working in quite the prominent big tech in Europe. 7k+ slack members. We abuse slack. inter-team daily work, intra teams coordination. Squads / topic q&a's, code reviews. Tribe based knowledge transfer, feedback, and many lulz. Of course an army of bots /webhooks about metrics, usage tresholds, alarms, even customer specific channels with automated bot support. All the platforms have wonderful apps, even the web fallback is feature complete, and a breeze to use. The ecosystem of 3rd party integrations and apps is just incredibly big... All of this works consistently, probably more than 99.99 of uptime, and almost never we had any service disruption. It definitely pays for itself.
- emptysongglass 5y ago
  It's extremely poor on Windows too: I've never seen an app pin all my cores and hit the power limits causing a tailspin to 400 MHz on a modern machine before.
vanderZwan 5y ago
The weird part there is that Zulip seems like a more sensible match for OSS especially since you can actually self-host it
- regularfry 5y ago
  Zulip was my backup plan if $BIGCORP decided not to renew our Slack subscription back in the day, for exactly this reason.
geuhdyfdy 5y ago
let's not miss the point. the only reason companies use slack/teams/gmail is because those services understand the data belongs to their clients (the employer) and will provide ways to access private chats/change ownership of private documents/etc with zero trouble.
- pm90 5y ago
  Yep, you're 100% right. I was genuinely shocked to learn that slack admins can configure it so that certain folks can read private chats. Once that became known, most of my team offloaded to discord/keybase (at a previous gig with toxic leadership).

Same, love Zulip but slack seems too entrenched at the moment. I'm hoping that OSS communities continue adopting it and using it instead of slack though.

by pm90 5y ago

Same, love Zulip but slack seems too entrenched at the moment. I'm hoping that OSS communities continue adopting it and using it instead of slack though.

sho_hn 5y ago

Meanwhile in Europe, where Slack never made much of a dent, Teams seems to be eating everything. ... which is frustrating, because its Linux desktop app is still quite poor and buggy in the basics.

sandermvanvliet 5y ago
I might be living in a different Europe than you but from what I see around my Slack is very pervasive and Teams is only used for video meetings because companies are already on office365. Nothing but hate for the chat/collaboration features…
- trulyme 5y ago
  There seem to be quite a few Europes around. The one I live in uses mostly Zoom, with some Teams, Skype, Slack and even Jitsi thrown in the mix. Yeah, Teams is the worst of them in every dimension.
  - sho_hn 5y ago
    We used to be on Zoom for video meetings, then it lost favor due to fears of industrial espionage (the encryption crisis, etc.) and via Office 365, Teams snuck up. Initially as a Zoom replacement only for video meetings, too, but lately folks seem to be discovering the other functionality and it's creeping in. Atlassian (Confluence/JIRA) otherwise.
    - trulyme 5y ago
      Not a fan of Zoom myself, just - it seems to be used quite a lot around me. For me Jitsi is king for video conferencing. Sorry about Jira. :)
      - sho_hn 5y ago
        The condolences are appreciated ... :-) Zoom's ugly as hell, but the Linux client has long been fairly reliable. Teams meanwhile is plagued by issues that don't seem to affect some other Electron-based apps or Chromium. During meetings it'll start out fine, then a minute in it'll suddenly use microphone. Opening any settings views tends to knock audio out of working state, too. Their official forums are full of threads on this, and support people suggesting crazy mitigations such as running it as root (admin user). The most recent release seems to be from September 2021, which is positively ancient for something based on a browser engine and using it to display complex content from remote hosts.
        adhesive_wombat 5y ago
        Not least, it doesn't seem to allow include Yubikey access which is a bit of bummer when that becomes a company wide thing. Then again Microsoft sites don't seem to work with security keys in Firefox either.
  - cyberpunk 5y ago
    I actually preferred teams to slack+zoom last few times I had to use it at a client. On MacOS it behaves pretty ok. Once you get used to the weird double text box.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  It really depends on which company you're in. Big companies where IT is considered a cost center and day-to-day users have no say in their tools will be using Teams, partly because they have no choice but also because for a lot of them the standard is already Windows and "Skype For Business" and they legitimately don't know how much better other tools are. In smaller companies where day-to-day users have a say in their tools, Teams would absolutely not fly, especially when said users most likely have experience with better tools such as Slack.
  - XorNot 5y ago
    If I'm being honest, Teams and Slack are both about as bad as each other. Threading in Slack in particular is so bad as to be an active productivity killer.
nseggs 5y ago
Not unlike the Windows version it seems
wellthisisgreat 5y ago
Team is horrendous. Literally the worst group chat there is
- cyberpunk 5y ago
  You totally missed hipchat, Skype for business and mattermost then?
  - wellthisisgreat 5y ago
    Hipchat yes, but Mattermost didn’t really leave that bad of an impression. A bland SaaS chat. Teams however… the search functionality where you can find the message but can’t jump to it so that you can see the rest of the conversation. I actually scrolled up for some 5 minutes non-stop once trying to get to the conversation like that
    - hallway_monitor 5y ago
      I don't know how long ago you used teams, but that feature has been active for a while now. Since that was your main complaint, maybe you will like it now.
      - wellthisisgreat 5y ago
        that was the cherry on top / the straw that broke the camel's back. Overall sluggishness and long loading times were probably the main problem. Zulip seems to be the endgame team messenger for us. Once you embrace the thread-first paradigm the old-school Slack/etc. single-thread approach is just too noisy.
walrus01 5y ago
teams is also an absolute CPU and memory hog on MacOS, even worse than slack, if that's possible.
- cyberpunk 5y ago
  I guess it depends how much utter nonsense is going on in your slack. A quiet (?) teams seems to behave better than the absolute crapshow of slack 'apps' at my current gig. All that being said, I do kinda like the outlook calendar app, means I never have to go to office.com anymore ;)
  - walrus01 5y ago
    if you want to see something amazing watch the CPU usage when somebody posts a high-framerate animated GIF into a slack channel, it can suck down 70% CPU usage and a massive amount of battery on almost any laptop. The idea that a primarily text based chat client can consume 70% CPU on a quad-core, 10th gen core i7 is amazing.
weisk 5y ago
Working in quite the prominent big tech in Europe. 7k+ slack members. We abuse slack. inter-team daily work, intra teams coordination. Squads / topic q&a's, code reviews. Tribe based knowledge transfer, feedback, and many lulz. Of course an army of bots /webhooks about metrics, usage tresholds, alarms, even customer specific channels with automated bot support. All the platforms have wonderful apps, even the web fallback is feature complete, and a breeze to use. The ecosystem of 3rd party integrations and apps is just incredibly big... All of this works consistently, probably more than 99.99 of uptime, and almost never we had any service disruption. It definitely pays for itself.
emptysongglass 5y ago
It's extremely poor on Windows too: I've never seen an app pin all my cores and hit the power limits causing a tailspin to 400 MHz on a modern machine before.

vanderZwan 5y ago

The weird part there is that Zulip seems like a more sensible match for OSS especially since you can actually self-host it

regularfry 5y ago
Zulip was my backup plan if $BIGCORP decided not to renew our Slack subscription back in the day, for exactly this reason.

geuhdyfdy 5y ago

let's not miss the point. the only reason companies use slack/teams/gmail is because those services understand the data belongs to their clients (the employer) and will provide ways to access private chats/change ownership of private documents/etc with zero trouble.

pm90 5y ago
Yep, you're 100% right. I was genuinely shocked to learn that slack admins can configure it so that certain folks can read private chats. Once that became known, most of my team offloaded to discord/keybase (at a previous gig with toxic leadership).