(Updated) Important upcoming changes to Microsoft Teams desktop client on Linux<p>Updated August 30, 2022: We are updating this message to indicate we will be retiring the Microsoft Teams desktop client on Linux in 90 days (early December). Please take action as appropriate for your organization.<p>We hear from you that you want the full richness of Microsoft Teams features on Linux such as background effects, reactions, gallery view, etc. We found the best way to act on this is to offer a Teams progressive web app (PWA) on Linux as a new feature of our current web client, which we’ll make available to our Linux customers in the coming months. PWA enables us to ship the latest Teams features faster to our Linux customers and helps us bridge the gaps that existed between the Teams desktop client on Linux and Windows. The PWA experience will be available on both Edge and Chrome browsers on Linux.<p>We will be retiring the Microsoft Teams desktop client on Linux in 90 days (early December), which is currently available in public preview. All users on the Microsoft Teams Linux desktop client will have to transition to the web or PWA version, which is where we will continue to invest our development resources. We are committed to helping all current customers on Linux start using the PWA app; we’ll publish guidance once we are closer to releasing this feature.<p>Teams PWA is an evolution of our Linux web experience - it offers the “best of the web with key functionalities of client”: zero-install, lightweight, and has a rich set of features. For example, the PWA version supports features such as:<p>Background blur and custom backgrounds
Reactions and raise hand in meetings
Large gallery and together mode
PWA also provides desktop-like app features such as:<p>System notifications for chat and channel
Dock icon with respective controls
Application auto-start
Easy access to system app permissions
When will this happen?<p>We plan to make Microsoft Teams PWA on Linux generally available in the coming months.<p>How will this affect me?<p>If your users/administrators use the Microsoft Teams Linux desktop client, they either need to set up the Microsoft Teams PWA (when it is generally available) or use the Teams Linux web app to ensure business continuity.<p>What do you need to do to prepare?<p>To prepare, we recommend informing all your users about the upcoming changes, encouraging them to switch over to the PWA (when it is generally available) to get the latest features on Linux along with a desktop-like experience. Microsoft will publish a blog post about this change and how to install Teams as a PWA on Edge and Chrome once we are closer to making this feature generally available on Linux in the coming months.
The Teams webapp is by far the slowest and most buggy of any video chat solution clients have asked me to use.<p>In one browser my mic works, but I cannot see screens shared by other people. In another browser it is the reverse. Also it is designed for WebGL which is not available on my OS and the software fallback takes 30 seconds to load and is slow as hell on a beefy 32 core Threadripper.<p>Jitsi, Meet, and others work flawlessly by comparison.
Good riddance. Can microsoft retire windows and mac apps now as well, please?<p>Seriously, I see zero point of shipping old/buggy chrome bundled with the app (aka "electron") for purpose of accessing some centralized service. PWA is the way to go here, yes.
I'm surprised they didn't say "why don't you just use Windows with WSL? We're trying our best to make sure your IT department forbids you from using anything else anyway"
Teams has been transformative in the way I work with my team over the last few years, and the pace of development is impressive.<p>But…<p>I cannot understand the absence of core functionality like copy & paste from chats. You can select a few messages (maybe a pageful) but there is no way to take a copy of a whole chat. You can’t print it. You can’t export it. Eventually it just gets lost in deep history, and you can only find it if you remember which keywords were in the text.<p>We resort to filing screenshots, which seems ridiculous.<p>There used to be dozens of threads on UserVoice crying out for this feature, but they all got wiped when the Teams team stopped using that. At the time the statement was “this is on our backlog” and it had been that way for several years.<p>I’d love an explanation of why.
(self-promotion ahead)<p>Since the Microsoft Teams client is well known for being quite frankly, terrible, as many have pointed out in this thread, I am working on my own, alternative Teams client: OperCom.<p>I'm building it as a simple, vanilla JS web application, in a SaaS model (since I need to keep bending to Microsoft's will). The Teams API isn't great to reverse engineer, but it's do-able and has been done (partially) before, but never to the extent required to create a full-featured app.<p>If anybody's interested, you can see its current status at [1] and keep updated with its progress at [2].<p>[1] <a href="https://blog.opercom.co.uk/posts/news-13-08-22/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.opercom.co.uk/posts/news-13-08-22/</a>
[2] <a href="https://www.opercom.co.uk/contact" rel="nofollow">https://www.opercom.co.uk/contact</a>
I have used <a href="https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux</a> before, it is quite a nice experience (better than the official app!) and it might be something suitable when the web client is broken with no clear reason why.
What horrible software... I switched to running Teams in Edge on Linux awhile ago to get camera blur and it's just as bad as the native client was...
> We hear from you that you want the full richness of Microsoft Teams features on Linux such as background effects, reactions, gallery view<p>Hum... As a Windows Teams user, can you remove those features from the Windows client too?
Frankly, I'd prefer things like this. After the Zoom security issues came to light, I'd much prefer web apps over native apps, assuming the web apps can be made to be performant on Firefox. The fewer closed-source programs running on my computer, the better.
Wait.
I have two different team accounts, and you can switch from the app itself but it takes time and you don't receive notifications from the unused account, which makes it useless.
I also don't have it as a web tab because there are issues with calls and sharing screens this way.<p>So instead I have two team apps installed. One from flatpack and the other from the gnome store (or something like that, don't remember the exact stores).
And they work great! Well, they work as awful as the teams app work, but simultaneously without any issue at all.<p>With the PWA can you have multiple independent instances? Please tell me yes...
Disclaimer: I'm currently part of Tandem.<p>Building a multi platform video conferencing app that is also stable and performant is extremely challenging. I can understand Microsoft's decision. That said, it's unfortunate that Linux users aren't going to have access to a desktop client anymore.<p>If you're looking for a new video conferencing tool, check out www.tandem.chat. We support linux/mac/windows (along with a web app) and we're built from the ground up for hybrid and remote first teams.<p>We're happy to extend an HN discount to any interested teams or answer any questions. Just email me at akash@tandem.chat.
Good, the current client auto starts on boot even though I'm not signed in. I've got to close 3 windows to get the thing to go away every time.
This is a load of bull crap from MS (I am fine with a PWA though). Teams is built atop electron. They purposefully kept the Linux version crappy for some reason. Possibly because, if they do one app for Linux, they might have to make other apps as well. Microsoft loves Linux my ass.
Lots of vitriol in this thread. Wow.<p>I'm grateful that Microsoft is giving Linux desktop a shot. Thanks for remembering us! (No sarcasm. I'm really impressed at how well Office works in Firefox-Linux.)
No matter what Linux setup I've had over the last years, at some point either my webcam or sound input/output will break. Either permanently from an update or randomly during meetings. Restarting the apps and possibly reconnecting the hardware usually fixes it, maybe a restart.<p>There's this uncertainty that's big enough for me to stick to a Macbook when working.
Hopefully this means it stops prompting me to open links to other channels or comments via xdg-open'ing the desktop app, with no way to make it default to opening them in the website instead.
I had to switch over to running Teams in Edge because it was barely functional otherwise. The only thing I run on edge though is Teams so really barely a change for me.
Please, for the love of all that is pure, just make Teams a native Windows app instead of this Chromium/Electron crap that feels out of place on <i>any</i> platform, not to mention being dog slow.<p>And please leave Outlook alone. Don't even think about turning it into a junky cross platform web-ish app.
If this web app is less of a resource hog than the Teams app on the Mac, I'll switch to it in a heartbeat. Between Teams and Outlook, M$ consumes over one GB of my mac's RAM. If a browser's memory footprint grows by less than that when running those apps (unavoidable, where I work), that'd be a big win over the current status quo, IMHO.
will it be able to show more than 4 others in a video chat at once? which seems to be another strange limitation of the Linux "teams" client.
Arg.<p>As many issues as the Linux version had, using the web version was worse.<p>I guess I shouldn't have expected from to actually follow throughon Teams for Linux.
Microsoft Teams is one of the worst desktop apps I've used - on Windows and Mac.<p>You can see how it's built on layers and layers of badly designed compatibility layers and bad engineering decisions.<p>Massive CPU hog, unacceptable side effects (disconnecting Bluetooth devices), super laggy UI and overall poor UX are the headlines.<p>I decided to invest in an alternative VC platform for my business because it was that bad.
> We hear from you that you want the full richness of Microsoft Teams features on Linux such as background effects, reactions, gallery view, etc.<p>Just to be clear, we don't want any of your shit, let alone the full shit.