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.
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.
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.
Of all my many gripes with Teams, it usually handles code surprisingly well. Single `inline` and triple backtick blocks usually render as you'd expect.
OneNote on the other hand doesn't support a code-block at all, and is worse (if you can believe it) than storing cli commands in Word docs.
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.
/usr/bin/chromium --ozone-platform=wayland --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform,WaylandWindowDecorations,WebRTCPipeWireCapturer --user-data-dir=/home/myuser/.config/chromium-ilri --app=https://teams.microsoft.com
Granted I haven't tried O365 in about a year since it was so unusable in Firefox.
As far as teams goes, I use it in the same version chromium on the same OS on two different computers; one works fine most of the time (main issue is it sometimes switches the audio back to the first item listed by Linux, which is not my USB headset). The other computer is terrible. Somewhere between 4-48 hours it pops up a tiny (maybe 40px) banner at the top saying "you need to sign in again" meanwhile there are no notifications and any messages I send are silently queued with no obvious indication that they haven't been delivered. Before I figured this out, I was just randomly out of communication with my coworkers, with both sides thinking we were sending the other person messages that they were ignoring. Clicking the "sign in" button on the banner just seems to reload teams and doesn't even ask me to sign in.
I've got two customers that both use Slack for everything except calls. One does calls in Meet and the other one in Teams. I asked to the Teams one and they told me that Teams works for everybody every time. Slack sometimes has problems with the video or audio setup. Too bad, because huddles are only one click away.
So, what am I doing wrong? How do I get the authentic Teams user experience that everyone else here seemingly has?
Also, it HAS to rename my files.
Also sending code barely works, and not for long messages
This is just on top of my head
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.
I now use Slack, Zoom, Google Workspace etc. and don’t enjoy the experience at all. It feels low quality and messy compared to Teams.
It's just not good. When you compare it to Slack, etc. it's just constantly awkward and getting in the way. And it tries to do too much, on top of that.
Slack is rapidly getting shittier though, so.
The main thing that trips me up is that I often confuse my Outlook calendar for me Teams calendar - because they look almost the same but work completely differently.
Teams fails every day at its basic purpose. Chats are confusing, the threaded ones being utterly useless. Constantly have to use the mouse to do basic stuff like address people or change channel. Stuff randomly breaks all the time, syntax highlighting seems to break in some new way every other week. It's complete garbage software and a massive regression for those of us who remember proper, simple chat software from decades ago.
This isn't sarcasm or anything, I really mean it. If you're somehow on Teams' happy path and it does what you expect then I'm envious, I wish I was you and I am grateful that it's helpful to you at least.
For me, though, the frustration stems from being forced to use it at work, which amplifies every quirk tenfold. Minor annoyances like duplicated groups of the same people (splitting chat histories across sessions), the "every team is a SharePoint site" bloat, and the massive resource drain (though that's easing as hardware improves) add up fast.
That is to say that they also relay all of their calls through datacenters half a continent away, so if you're close to one of those then it's fine but the further you are the more likely you are to accidentally talk over people and so on, there's no peer-to-peer, even 1:1 calls are relayed with Teams; making Google Meet and Jitsi perform "better" (though people can't explain why).
Then there's the dev-side slop: mangled code snippets in chats, meeting controls jammed at the top (pulling your eyes away from the camera), and—God help you: if you've ever tried building chatops integrations on it, you'd break down and cry. Like, real, actual office-bathroom breakdown tears.
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.
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.
That being said, in the last job where I used it regularly, Teams was responsible for 100% of the blue screens I regularly experienced. Dell laptop and some quirk of interaction between Teams video calls, NVidia graphics drivers, and WiFi drivers than no update ever fixed. Very frustrating.
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
Then one day the company switched from zoom to teams. She now had to be plugged in constantly.
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 :(
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.
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.
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.
But for something you use 3-5x a day, that is a noticeable problem every few days. Why it has such an awful reputation.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Thus, I detest communities having slack as a first point of contact.
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.
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.
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.
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).
That covers what I'll encounter in a typical week. There are one-offs as well. It's not the worst software I work with, but talking to my team should really be zero friction.
We have 5-6 different "endpoint protection" and security related pieces of software running on our machines at all times. We also have enterprise SSO via SAML2 which is constantly logging us out, saying we aren't logged in, re-prompting over and over to enrol the machine into some management policy which then hangs the program if you click yes, and makes you re-authenticate (eg redo login and MFA) if you click no.
It frequently just hangs when you click join on a call. Sometimes when you are talking it stops responding but other people can still hear and see you, which is annoying because if you un-mute or take over the screen in a large company meeting, but then get stuck with mic on or presenting, everyone can awkwardly keep watching you while you can't stop doing either of those for 45-60 seconds.
Many of these problems are probably just due to the machines being hampered by huge amounts of instrumentation/monitoring/interception, but teams is much worse than other electron apps. For example, Slack and vscode do not exhibit these problems on the same machine.
One example is the inability to share only part of your screen. This is essential if you’re working on a large, ultra-wide monitor. There’s been a feature request for this on Microsofts feedback site for years.
Also, how embarrassing is it that the biggest software company in the world is not able to make a decent native app and has to resort to this html-app nonsense.
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.
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-progr...
Terrible, terrible app. Peak Microsoft lazy design.
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.
Appears they retired the linux version a while ago.
What good has Microsoft done for the world other than digital pain and suffering?
Minesweeper was kinda fun.
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.
Like all AI co-authored code it’s a matter of time before this becomes unmaintainable and abandoned.
(This is about official Windows and iOS Teams apps. I haven’t yet tried any GNU/Linux options.)
Web version has actually been working well overall for the past few months. No reason to install any desktop apps from Micr*soft.
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?
Well, I use Teams on Linux sometimes because I have a meeting and using a Linux machine at the time.
That might be YOUR reason, but I'm sure there are plenty to use linux besides to avoid bloatware.
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.
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.
It works great
https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/graph-explorer
Then you can execute the:
GET 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.
The Microsoft Teams client frustrates me daily.
I didn't find the chats/discussion UI at all clear initially, but once I'd had it explained to me, I could see what was going on.
(I do remember it taking a long time to load, and apparently using a surprising amount of memory once it was finally done, but aside from providing reliable fodder for water cooler conversations with other 40+ year old colleagues this never actually seemed to cause a problem in practice. At my last Teams-using job I would restart my PC no more than once or twice a week, something I could let happen in parallel with making the cup of tea that I'd always be making at some point anyway. And it had 64 GB RAM, which isn't even a lot by today's standards, but still Teams didn't actually fill all of it.)
>> I didn't find the chats/discussion UI at all clear initially, but once I'd had it explained to me, I could see what was going on.
This is an example of how bad it is: you had to have the chat UX explained to you. Combined with MS cramming as much crap into teams as possible and trying to tie you to their other products with integrations that barely or rarely work - and the AI features are terrible (and yet another MS AI offering called Copilot?). It really is that bad and I'm glad I no longer have to use it.
- random chunks of chat log can go temporarily missing at random when you scroll up. temporarily as in, they'll load on another device. on the regular one though, who knows when you'll get them back...
- if you manage to call someone the same time they do you, all bets are off. got things softlocked more than a few times.
- the usual recent Microsoft obsession with (keyboard-focus hijacking!) popups is of course also a thing in Teams
- text styling is hell, and sometimes when you click on the copy button in code blocks or copy out stuff in general, you get html tags polluting your copied data
- chats & group chats vs. team chats is extremely unnecessary and cumbersome
- multitenant support does a complete ui reload after which you miss notifications from the tenant you switched away from (might be different now)
- the localization is funky, just like in all other Microsoft products; from the small, like calendars starting on the wrong day, to the bigger, where if you ping @everyone in your Teams set to your native locale, then on the other side people will also see the ping in your native locale. It's just like Exchange/Outlook in this regard.
- the audio settings like getting mixed up, especially if you happen to disconnect and reconnect your stuff on the regular.
- they seemingly hardcode the URL preview thumbnail logic per trusted site, instead of using opengraph. their hardcoded integrations are also ignorant of e.g. url encoding and have other minor blemishes. I dare you to link the C++ wikipedia article to someone.
- profile pics go away sometimes (mine has been missing for weeks now, appears everywhere else), and statuses can get stuck or be null
These are all ongoing things that persist after years of use. Other, more questionable, already solved, or rare / one-off qualms would include:
- one time I tried screensharing, and when I clicked the button it showed me an emoji picker flyout instead of a share options flyout (lol)
- used to crash all the time in Edge of all things (not sure about other browsers), fixed since
- screenshare can freeze without you knowing any better thanks to the often extremely low framerate.
- slow (might be my terrible workstation)
- happily lies about delivery status and reorders messages
IMHO… Slack and Zoom are the best combo. Zoom being necessary because for some reason Slack just cannot handle meetings well.
It cannot keep track of what messages you have read, often you need to read the same messages twice. The set of emojis is limited (could be deemed a childish problem, but with 100% remote team emojis are important to have some fun). The layout of threads sucks, sometimes you have only a small side panel to work with. When you want to delete old notifications, it sometimes just says "Cannot delete".
It't the worst application I have to use at work. As soon as I have the possibility I will join a company again hat uses Zulip. Unfortunately those are rare.
This would be understandable if it happened quickly but normally Teams has a seizure for a minute or two when you try to join the call and then you get told to sign in. Whoever allowed this behavior to ship should be fired out a cannon... when I click join a call, absolutely nothing should stop me from joining a call.
In fairness this might not be explicitly Teams' fault. It's built on top of a terrible authentication platform which also seems to be down at least four or five days a year. 365 is one of those things that could not exist if not for the incredible monopoly Microsoft has over Excel.
If I have to use Teams, at least its not under 'Doze.
"you can run, but you can not hide".
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
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.
Also lets forget the fact that some people actually like coding or wanted a fun weekend project.
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.