This is a huge shame. I wish I could use a hardware phone or at least a SIP client. While there's technically no reason why a computer can't do just as well as

This is a huge shame. I wish I could use a hardware phone or at least a SIP client. While there's technically no reason why a computer can't do just as well as a dedicated phone (after all, a phone is just a low-powered computer), in practice, modern computer-based communications software is terrible. Protocols are all proprietary and are often centralized - there is no P2P, not even optionally. This is something Skype used to do brilliantly over a decade ago (on much slower hardware), preferring P2P if possible. The clients themselves are absolute trash. Hardware phones still have CPU speeds measured in megahertz and are faster & more responsive than modern communications software on multi-core, multi-gigahertz CPUs and gigabytes of RAM. Teams is the worst offender here, but even Zoom is not that great. Again, this is a problem that was solved decades ago, I remember having perfect calls on TeamSpeak 2 back in the days on machines much slower than now and sub-megabit DSL connections, and yet it's no longer something I can take for granted nowadays. I can establish and answer a SIP call between 2 hardware phones faster than the Slack takes to load. At least if they were using a standard (or at least documented) protocol I could write my own client, but since the objective is often "growth & engagement" that's not possible either because the annoyances of the official client are considered a feature by the original developer.