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Unofficial Microsoft Teams client for Linux
- ranger_danger 11mo agoREADME looks AI-generated, I wonder how much of the entire project was made the same way.
- aclindsa 11mo agoI didn't dig too deeply, but saw a commit message written by Claude
- worble 11mo agoThe CLAUDE.md is a bigger giveaway
- wizzledonker 11mo agoAfter 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.
- mrweasel 11mo agoI'm deeply fascinated that people can make this work at all. Just yesterday I had a fight with an AI regarding some Python code, the stupid thing wouldn't admit it didn't know how to use something and just kept spitting out the same lines of broken code. Then here is someone writing an entire functional Teams client with Claude.
- figmert 11mo agoUsually in those scenarios you stop and do the research yourself and correct it. You don't keep asking it. Also starting new conversations often help.
- mrweasel 11mo agoIf I'm doing the research and needs to correct the AI, if faster for just write the code myself. My experience is also that even if I can point to where the errors are, and explain the actual API, I frequently still get the same, broken, result anyway.
- gitmagic 11mo ago> Then here is someone writing an entire functional Teams client with Claude. According to the README it’s just a wrapper of the web version, with some additional stuff on top.
- neilv 11mo agoAlternative solution: Flee any company that uses Microsoft Teams.
- fooqux 11mo agoThe way the job market is right now, I wouldn't flee a company running MS-DOS.
- 65 11mo agoI would prefer to have a job that pays me money than to not have to use Teams.
- loloquwowndueo 11mo agoFine 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.
- stuaxo 11mo agoThis sounds wonderful, many of us just need to work somewhere and other things are more important than some of their unfortunate software choices.
- denimnerd42 11mo agoI'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.
- crims0n 11mo agoIt 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.
- perching_aix 11mo ago
- lousken 11mo agoIf only they fixed screen sharing on firefox in the official web version...
- lillesvin 11mo agoI use screen sharing from the official web client in Firefox on both Debian and Fedora without any issues. What issue(s) do you encounter?
- calvinmorrison 11mo agoI have one thats purveying over apparently linux, mac, chrome, firefox... when you screenshare on multiple monitors (or workspaces) the screen stops updating.
- SV_BubbleTime 11mo agoMy screen share went from fine to low resolution all the time. Really annoying.
- broadsidepicnic 11mo agoI tried just yesterday with latest firefox and fedora, screen sharing didn't work out of the box. Only screen sharing by creating a virtual display worked, not sharing the current screen nor tab.
- lousken 11mo agoit doesn't work "Your video isn't working. We couldn't access your camera."
- tetris11 11mo agoworks fine for me
- quasigod 11mo agoPretty 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.
- badthingfactory 11mo agoI avoid Teams as much as possible, but when I have to join a Teams meeting the PWA works fine.
- linuxdaemon 11mo agoI'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.
- vee-kay 11mo agoThere'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 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-progressive-web-apps https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-progr...
- bigbuppo 11mo agoWhy would you do this? What purpose does this serve other than to create additional misery and suffering in this world?
- mberning 11mo agoI 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?
- loloquwowndueo 11mo agoBeeper mini.
- gerdesj 11mo agoTeams 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.
- SG- 11mo agoI mean that's like real life too right? you'll die eventually so might as well give up? or you might get hit by a car tomorrow too so yeah don't bother with anything. Also lets forget the fact that some people actually like coding or wanted a fun weekend project.
- EionRobb 11mo agoI enjoy the cat-and-mouse! I've been writing the Teams plugin for Pidgin for the past few years and its great to be able to give users the kind of features or privacy options that you'd never get from official clients, while learning lots of fun ways (ab)using web tech to solve problems. Like how in Teams, it does a "reverse webhook" to push presence notifications to a web client acting as a server over a websocket
- 7952 11mo agoNo idea if it applies here. But many people outside of tech start crafty projects as a way of regaining some control from stress and pressure. Its fun, rewarding and something you can do in a sea of things you can't.
- hdgvhicv 11mo agoI’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
- le-mark 11mo agoI 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.
- 65 11mo agoMy 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?
- tomrod 11mo agoClear the teams cache, it can persist after uninstall.
- ohm 11mo agoUse this app to uninstall it https://freemacsoft.net/appcleaner/ https://freemacsoft.net/appcleaner/ it should remove all traces of the app from computer
- 65 11mo agoI should complain on Hacker News more often. That worked! Finally. Thank you!
- CoastalCoder 11mo ago> What good has Microsoft done for the world other than digital pain and suffering? Minesweeper was kinda fun.
- SG- 11mo agogrowing up as a Mac user in the 80s and 90s I always found it a really dumb game.
- CoastalCoder 11mo agoI was damning with faint praise.
- notepad0x90 11mo agoTeams 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.
- nmstoker 11mo agoIt'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.
- mastazi 11mo agoI'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.
- happymellon 11mo agoI 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.
- jrm4 11mo agoHmm. 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.
- DANmode 11mo agoThe Web never goes out of style!
- gtirloni 11mo agoMust be nice to be Teams' product manager and see this. /s
- DANmode 11mo agoYou think their boss reads HN?!
- rand17 11mo agoCopilot has neither eyes, nor feelings.
- self_awareness 11mo agoYou wrongly assume that they care.
- scblock 11mo agoI use this a lot and it works well.
- wanderingmind 11mo agoTeams 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.
- smitty1e 11mo agoInstalled 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.
- hosteur 11mo agoPlease make an unofficial client for windows too. The official one sucks so much it is hard to even describe.
- jacquesm 11mo agoIt's effectively malware.
- jonathanlydall 11mo agoI 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).
- rf15 11mo agoI'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.
- varispeed 11mo ago"Works for me, so it must for everyone else"
- jonathanlydall 11mo agoWho are you quoting? If you want to paraphrase my reply it would be more like: “It works for some people, it doesn’t work for some people, what might be different between those groups of people?”
- hvea 11mo agoperception and expectations play a big role. different users have varying sensitivity to latency and people's standards for software performance can differ based on what they're accustomed to.
- dominiwe 11mo agoI 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.
- mrintegrity 11mo agoYou can also try this user script which I am using in Firefox https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/552472-allow-pip-in-teams-meetings https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/552472-allow-pip-in-teams-... It works great
- jacquesm 11mo agoThe 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.
- pjmlp 11mo agoI really don't get what that team is up to, even ICQ would be so much better.
- happycube 11mo agoIt's meant to be Just Good Enough to keep C-Suites from picking Zoom and Slack.
- pjmlp 11mo agoYeah, but like is no one proud on that team to actually deliver something useful?
- okayjustonemore 11mo agoMicrosoft in a nutshell.
- Yumako 11mo agoSome of my coworkers connect every day to our calls with Linux machines.
- jacquesm 11mo agoYes, 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.
- LouDNL 11mo agoPlease don't, now I can no longer say that I cannot use teams. If you want to use it so bad, go back to Windows...
- skrebbel 11mo agoYou can, but now you have to be honest about why.
- microflash 11mo agoYou can still dodge the bullet by saying this is an “unofficial” client using which may violate an unknown amount of compliance bullet points.
- magguzu 11mo agoMan I hate Teams with a passion but if someone on my team said this I'd know they were full of it. I use Linux and the PWA is functional enough.
- Neil44 11mo agoThe Teams works well as a PWA on Ubuntu, everything works meeting ings chats etc etc.
- 0ld 11mo agoI’ve been using teams for years in a browser (on my FreeBSD desktop), and I find it good enough for doing my job - chats work, calls work, presentations work, screen sharing works. or should I say mostly work… sure, it’s as glitchy as it ever was and may fail for any reason at any time, but you don’t really need an app to experience all that
- pjmlp 11mo agoJust use the Web interface, it is the same anyway.
- crimsonnoodle58 11mo agoMicrosoft Edge for Linux + Teams installed as an app (PWA) works perfectly fine for all our devs, anything else like this is just an additional security risk.
- ris 11mo agoNative applications are a scourge, if only from a security standpoint.
- jxdxbx 11mo agoI have tried and failed to use the Mac Teams app repeatedly. I will try to join a meeting I’ve been invited to, but there is some conflict between my personal and word Microsoft accounts that causes it to flip out. Only the web app reliably lets me actually join a meeting.
- ta12653421 11mo agodoes it allow to disable(!) incoming(!) video completely?
- Xss3 11mo agoMy biggest gripe with teams is their markdown formatting. It works if you type it out character by character, but paste some Markdown in and it does nothing.
- self_awareness 11mo agoTeams is good with video calls, but so was Skype, which was apparently used as the video backend system. Rest of Teams? Abysmal. Logging to text files? Missing. Search? Broken. Speed? Sometimes the UI jumps around and I click the wrong things, because UI hasn't been loaded by the time I'm trying to click something. Formatting? Sometimes it's impossible, and I need to edit the message after sending, to be able to properly format it. If you don't have problems with Teams, you're simply not using them enough.
- Havoc 11mo agoLet me guess it runs on a potato unlike the official one...
- jll29 11mo agoWhy would I want to use Teams on Linux? One reason to use Linux is to avoid such bloatware with unbearably poor UX. Rumor has it that a usability consultant died from a heart attack when he saw the first alpha build, but I may misremember the story (or confuse it with the deadly joke by Monty Python). I'm totally fine with text-based chat, and it had better be implementing an open standard (e.g. USENET news or Jabber). And it's by no means restricted to Microsoft: many companies use unclear interfaces with non-existant discoverability, sluggish response times, and cryptic menu names like "..." or "+"; and nobody neads multi-row menus at the top to compete for attention with left-side column menus, each of which featuring symbols that lack clarity - since when is one pane of icons not enough?
- dangus 11mo agoI use Linux because I find that it has more capability than commercial operating systems for my needs. I do count “running commercial software” as a need of mine. I would not be using Linux if I couldn’t run Windows games on Steam, 1Password, Slack, Discord, etc. Nobody’s forcing you to install Teams, and someone out there is breathing a sigh of relief because they have another option besides Mac and Windows for running the programs they need to run. I’m not really in a race to be the most opinionated user on the planet who refuses to use an app with a … or + menu, I just want a good OS that runs any program I might need.
- ukd1 11mo agoSome customers (e.g. DoD, gov) basically exclusively use it, so you'd have to if you ever interacted with them. This is a win.
- surajrmal 11mo agoBecause you work for a company that uses Microsoft teams most likely. It's not always a choice you get to make.
- osigurdson 11mo ago>> Why would I want to use Teams on Linux? Well, I use Teams on Linux sometimes because I have a meeting and using a Linux machine at the time.
- IanTerzo 11mo agoI'm actually making an alternative client since I couldn't stand the normal one. https://github.com/IanTerzo/Squads https://github.com/IanTerzo/Squads
- krauses 11mo agoWould this make it easier to consume and store Teams data locally, avoiding the need for tagging M365 Graph API, if the goal is to build analytics or automation on top of Teams for things my personal account has access to?
- junto 11mo agoDepending on how locked down your Entra / AD is, you can login to Graph Explorer: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/graph-explorer https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/graph-explorer Then you can execute the: GET https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/me/memberOf https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/me/memberOf This will return you all the Entra Groups you are in, this includes the Microsoft Teams groups as well.
- jjtheblunt 11mo agoFor Linux made me instantly remember the phrase "you can run, but you can not hide".
- JaggerJo 11mo agoNice! A screenshot in the readme would be a great addition. I was looking for a native macOS Teams client a while ago - but to my knowledge this is the first 3rd party Teams client. The Microsoft Teams client frustrates me daily.
- baby 11mo agoWhy not use the webapp?
- okayjustonemore 11mo agoTeams is one of those apps that I wish would just leave the realm of the living and never come back in any shape or form. Terrible, terrible app. Peak Microsoft lazy design.
- dustymcp 11mo agoI use it, it has its quirks but surprisingly its buggy and faster than the official one..
- worldsavior 11mo agoLooks cool but some pictures would help.
- nottorp 11mo agoIt’s not a client but a wrapped web site though.
- lovegrenoble 11mo agoIt's better to avoid Teams if possible
- jeena 11mo agoThe Linux client is terrible. But that is why I for work stuff use Chromium and I didn't really have issues with it. The things in this list: System notifications - works with Chromium System tray integration (badge support varies by desktop environment) - I don't have a system tray on Hyprland with waybar Custom backgrounds & themes - ok, I never needed it but that is probably the only thing which is not working in Chromium Screen sharing support - Always worked, as long as you allow it Multiple account profiles - I'm doing that with different Chromium profiles, but yeah it kind of would be nice if it was possible in one window, so that seems also cool But for those two features it seems it's more hassle to deal with a unofficial version.
- pelagicAustral 11mo agoI can't be the only person that noticed this, but the Teams client for Linux never times you out, or never shows you as away, even when the pc is idle for hours on end...
- wildredkraut 11mo agoWell, Teams does the job(listen to bigger events and waste productivity with chit chat)
- more_corn 10mo agoGod no