7 ms·

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

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.

pjmlp 1y ago
I really don't get what that team is up to, even ICQ would be so much better.
- happycube 1y ago
  It's meant to be Just Good Enough to keep C-Suites from picking Zoom and Slack.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Yeah, but like is no one proud on that team to actually deliver something useful?
    - okayjustonemore 1y ago
      Microsoft in a nutshell.
Yumako 1y ago
Some of my coworkers connect every day to our calls with Linux machines.
- jacquesm 1y ago
  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.
  - Yumako 1y ago
    [dead]
- Tor3 1y ago
  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.
  - ahartmetz 1y ago
    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.
  - prmoustache 1y ago
    > 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.
WD-42 1y ago
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.
- dontlaugh 1y ago
  Some of the audio stack is probably still from Skype.
- nolok 1y ago
  Then again, what they did to Skype is a study case in how to destroy a platform users loved.
- jval43 1y ago
  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.
Gigachad 1y ago
Teams doesn't work much better on Mac. It's easily the worst program I have to use.
- jnsaff2 1y ago
  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.
  - alentred 1y ago
    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.
- necovek 1y ago
  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 :(
jstanley 1y ago
I used Teams in Firefox on Linux and didn't have any issues with it, other than it being generally slow and bad.
ErroneousBosh 1y ago
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.
- aorth 1y ago
  True! I've been doing this for years on Linux. I use a dedicated Chromium instance in app mode: /usr/bin/chromium --ozone-platform=wayland --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform,WaylandWindowDecorations,WebRTCPipeWireCapturer --user-data-dir=/home/myuser/.config/chromium-ilri --app=https://teams.microsoft.com 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.
  - cromka 1y ago
    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.
    - homebrewer 1y ago
      What kind of URLs does it use? If it's anything with a unique prefix (like Telegram's tg://), you can add it to the desktop file: MimeType=x-scheme-handler/foobar; and run `update-mime-database`. If not, I would write a shell wrapper and set it as the default browser; something to the effect of: #!/usr/bin/bash set -eu for arg in "$@"; do if [[ $arg == *whatever-url-teams-uses.com* ]]; then exec gtk-launch teams "$@" fi done exec gtk-launch firefox "$@" (gtk-launch uses flags from the .desktop file so you don't have to repeat them)
  - snickerer 1y ago
    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?
georgefrowny 1y ago
> 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.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  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.
- jacquesm 1y ago
  Of course they don't mind building their own tech stacks on top of Linux but forget about actual product support.
EbNar 1y ago
Teams is literally the worst program I have ever used. Whoever designed that interface should be publicly shamed.
- klardotsh 1y ago
  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.
- nolok 1y ago
  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.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Couldn't agree more.
- cycomanic 1y ago
  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
andyjohnson0 1y ago
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?
- StopDisinfo910 1y ago
  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.
  - gausswho 1y ago
    > 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.
  - mtalantikite 1y ago
    > 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.
larusso 1y ago
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 ^^
- GuestFAUniverse 1y ago
  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.
  - larusso 1y ago
    Ah well yes. We have this as well but I think it is still under control for us. We fight more the sheer amount of channels. It’s so damn easy to create channels and invite people to channels etc. But that is also true for Teams.
twelvedogs 1y ago
microsoft couldn't do it in 95 either
constantcrying 1y ago
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?
osigurdson 1y ago
>> 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.
- MattGaiser 1y ago
  > 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.
  - osigurdson 1y ago
    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.
    - okayjustonemore 1y ago
      The hate comes, deservedly I might add, from a lot more than just dropped calls. Terrible UI. Horrendous performance. Bloated apps. Confusing UX. Completely broken integration with the desktop/browser. Teams is an absolute mess.
      - osigurdson 1y ago
        >> Horrendous performance When I click on something in Teams it shows up in (I'd say) < 300ms most times. I'm sure it could be much faster if done better. However, is that what you mean by "horrendous" or are you seeing 30s freezes or something like that?
        okayjustonemore 1y ago
        Using Teams on Safari on a maxed out M2 Pro machine proves to be a ridiculously slow affair. Moving between sections takes ~1s, ending a call makes the sound crack for a few seconds in the most broken and awful way (while locking the UI in place for the duration), it refuses to understand what the browser’s back button is for, there are plenty of slow downs when using the chat... Surprisingly enough, though, the video part seems to work just fine, everything else, however, is a headache-inducing experience. And I refuse to switch browsers just to use this disgrace of an app. If it’s supposed to work on the web it should not care which browser I’m accessing it from, otherwise a native app (read: not webview-based) should be made available.
jlarocco 1y ago
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.
GuB-42 1y ago
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.
- v1ne 1y ago
  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.
  - com2kid 1y ago
    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.
  - linguae 1y ago
    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.
woutercx 1y ago
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..
- lpcvoid 1y ago
  Your technical work environment sounds horrible to me. Windows + Citrix is enough to send me screaming. Kudos that you pull through like that.
  - jacquesm 1y ago
    Pretty common for secure development environments.
  - woutercx 1y ago
    Yes. And the work environment has gotten slow as molasses. Especially when starting up. It takes 10 minutes to get responsive and load all the applications. Windows 11 has made it even worse. But hey, that’s a good moment to fetch coffee when I’m in the office and socialize with colleagues.
sans_souse 1y ago
upvoting out of principle

pjmlp 1y ago

I really don't get what that team is up to, even ICQ would be so much better.

happycube 1y ago
It's meant to be Just Good Enough to keep C-Suites from picking Zoom and Slack.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Yeah, but like is no one proud on that team to actually deliver something useful?
  - okayjustonemore 1y ago
    Microsoft in a nutshell.

Yumako 1y ago

Some of my coworkers connect every day to our calls with Linux machines.

jacquesm 1y ago
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.
- Yumako 1y ago
  [dead]
Tor3 1y ago
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.
- ahartmetz 1y ago
  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.
- prmoustache 1y ago
  > 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.

WD-42 1y ago

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.

dontlaugh 1y ago
Some of the audio stack is probably still from Skype.
nolok 1y ago
Then again, what they did to Skype is a study case in how to destroy a platform users loved.
jval43 1y ago
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.

Gigachad 1y ago

Teams doesn't work much better on Mac. It's easily the worst program I have to use.

jnsaff2 1y ago
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.
- alentred 1y ago
  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.
necovek 1y ago
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 :(

jstanley 1y ago

I used Teams in Firefox on Linux and didn't have any issues with it, other than it being generally slow and bad.

ErroneousBosh 1y ago

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.

aorth 1y ago
True! I've been doing this for years on Linux. I use a dedicated Chromium instance in app mode: /usr/bin/chromium --ozone-platform=wayland --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform,WaylandWindowDecorations,WebRTCPipeWireCapturer --user-data-dir=/home/myuser/.config/chromium-ilri --app=https://teams.microsoft.com 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.
- cromka 1y ago
  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.
  - homebrewer 1y ago
    What kind of URLs does it use? If it's anything with a unique prefix (like Telegram's tg://), you can add it to the desktop file: MimeType=x-scheme-handler/foobar; and run `update-mime-database`. If not, I would write a shell wrapper and set it as the default browser; something to the effect of: #!/usr/bin/bash set -eu for arg in "$@"; do if [[ $arg == *whatever-url-teams-uses.com* ]]; then exec gtk-launch teams "$@" fi done exec gtk-launch firefox "$@" (gtk-launch uses flags from the .desktop file so you don't have to repeat them)
- snickerer 1y ago
  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?

georgefrowny 1y ago

> 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.

pjmlp 1y ago
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.
jacquesm 1y ago
Of course they don't mind building their own tech stacks on top of Linux but forget about actual product support.

EbNar 1y ago

Teams is literally the worst program I have ever used. Whoever designed that interface should be publicly shamed.

klardotsh 1y ago
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.
nolok 1y ago
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.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Couldn't agree more.
cycomanic 1y ago
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

andyjohnson0 1y ago

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?

StopDisinfo910 1y ago
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.
- gausswho 1y ago
  > 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.
- mtalantikite 1y ago
  > 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.

larusso 1y ago

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 ^^

GuestFAUniverse 1y ago
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.
- larusso 1y ago
  Ah well yes. We have this as well but I think it is still under control for us. We fight more the sheer amount of channels. It’s so damn easy to create channels and invite people to channels etc. But that is also true for Teams.

twelvedogs 1y ago

microsoft couldn't do it in 95 either

constantcrying 1y ago

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?

osigurdson 1y ago

>> 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.

MattGaiser 1y ago
> 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.
- osigurdson 1y ago
  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.
  - okayjustonemore 1y ago
    The hate comes, deservedly I might add, from a lot more than just dropped calls. Terrible UI. Horrendous performance. Bloated apps. Confusing UX. Completely broken integration with the desktop/browser. Teams is an absolute mess.
    - osigurdson 1y ago
      >> Horrendous performance When I click on something in Teams it shows up in (I'd say) < 300ms most times. I'm sure it could be much faster if done better. However, is that what you mean by "horrendous" or are you seeing 30s freezes or something like that?
      - okayjustonemore 1y ago
        Using Teams on Safari on a maxed out M2 Pro machine proves to be a ridiculously slow affair. Moving between sections takes ~1s, ending a call makes the sound crack for a few seconds in the most broken and awful way (while locking the UI in place for the duration), it refuses to understand what the browser’s back button is for, there are plenty of slow downs when using the chat... Surprisingly enough, though, the video part seems to work just fine, everything else, however, is a headache-inducing experience. And I refuse to switch browsers just to use this disgrace of an app. If it’s supposed to work on the web it should not care which browser I’m accessing it from, otherwise a native app (read: not webview-based) should be made available.

jlarocco 1y ago

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.

GuB-42 1y ago

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.

v1ne 1y ago
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.
- com2kid 1y ago
  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.
- linguae 1y ago
  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.

woutercx 1y ago

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..

lpcvoid 1y ago
Your technical work environment sounds horrible to me. Windows + Citrix is enough to send me screaming. Kudos that you pull through like that.
- jacquesm 1y ago
  Pretty common for secure development environments.
- woutercx 1y ago
  Yes. And the work environment has gotten slow as molasses. Especially when starting up. It takes 10 minutes to get responsive and load all the applications. Windows 11 has made it even worse. But hey, that’s a good moment to fetch coffee when I’m in the office and socialize with colleagues.

sans_souse 1y ago

upvoting out of principle