Unofficial Microsoft Teams Client for Linux

I'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.

I can list off a few issues, but as usual, who and how many will share these experiences is a complete toss-up:

- 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

It 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.

I only use the PWA. Typing is not keyboard friendly, you need to use the mouse for formatting. Some keyboard shortcuts exist, but some don't work if you don't have an English keyboard.

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.

The only complaints I have is that is slightly sluggish.

Zoom, Slack and Google Meet all work as well or better than Teams for it's primary purpose: video calls. Teams freezes up, consume ALL your resources, going from one call to another and it just stops working. The only thing I've used that's worse is Chime.

>> 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.

It’s more incredible to me that Microsoft has different versions of teams that don’t work with each other, but are named the same thing, and that the home version of teams that doesn’t work with enterprise teams comes forcibly bundled with an pro or enterprise os.

Teams is the only meeting app where I am usually late because it doesn't just let me join my meeting. Zoom will never lock up letting you join a meeting because someone decided you need to reauthenticate Teams regularly.

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.

It's gotten so much better recently, and I used to be a Teams hater.

I have one thats purveying over apparently linux, mac, chrome, firefox... when you screenshare on multiple monitors (or workspaces) the screen stops updating.

My screen share went from fine to low resolution all the time. Really annoying.

If we're listing Team's idiosyncrasies, when you're chatting with exactly one person in a group chat after all the others have left, their name becomes "just me". You won't ever see their real name again.

Most annoying bug I experience is occasionally all messages I send not being delivered silently. You only realize it after a long while when no one seems to react to anything you say. Open in another device and you can't see your own messages. They are not delayed they just never get delivered. Such an unreliable tool being used in a professional environment.

lol android/windows user here. all those bugs are so common, it's hilarious how bad teams is.

There'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

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...

What on earth was in that file?

I should complain on Hacker News more often. That worked! Finally. Thank you!

growing up as a Mac user in the 80s and 90s I always found it a really dumb game.

"Works for me, so it must for everyone else"

I'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.

Apart from it being slow, a memory hog and having a shitty web-based UI that feels out of place regardless of what OS you’re using. It’s missing basic features.

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'm using teams at work and it's a laggy buggy mess, even with fairly beefy machines (eg. 64GB RAM, nvme ssd, workstation gpu). By this I mean when you click on a button or hover over something on the UI there is frequently more than 5 seconds for it to respond (eg. stuff like hovering over a button, it should show a hover state, but that won't appear unless you park the mouse over it for several seconds).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Some of the audio stack is probably still from Skype.

Then again, what they did to Skype is a study case in how to destroy a platform users loved.

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.

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 :(

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.

  MimeType=x-scheme-handler/foobar;

  #!/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 "$@"

If by perfect you mean that you can’t have two chats open next to each other and toggling between chats is slow as molasses then yes.

It works but it takes a long time to load.

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.

I worked in an all Linux dev shop. Our Lead refused to install Electron apps and ran them in Chrome tabs instead. It just worked. I dont remember how we ran Teams back then though.

Exactly, I've been very pleasantly surprised at how well teams works in the browser on Linux. Much better than zoom!

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.

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.

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

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.

Spoken like someone who has never used Deltek Maconomy. Teams is really bad but not Deltek Maconomy bad. Nothing else I’ve used is.

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.

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.

Same for me, it works and allows me to do what I need to do. It does it neither gracefully or efficiently, but I think that's down to it trying to be everything at once, and the UI suffers as a result.

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.

mIRC and many other clients just sat there and did their thing. 30 years ago. Countless projects have been coordinated via IRC. This isn't a high bar for chat software.

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.

I’m also puzzled by the hate for Teams. I used Teams for years and developed on Power Platform. The integration between all the pieces of the MS stack is unrivaled.

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.

Techincally it works, but the UX is terrible. So many times I couldnt copy a message because of the stupid emojis popping up right below my mouse, so that you have opportunity to look dumb after sending a "heart" in a professional meeting about serious matter.

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

The biggest problems with Teams -- which I had to use daily for over a year and a half at my previous job -- is with its UX, not its implementation. I found bugs in the Linux client here and there, but they weren't showstoppers. But using it was just frustrating because it got in the way of communication and didn't work how I expected.

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.

In the strictest form Teams "works". You can chat with people, you can do video calls, you can share files. Outside of the core "calling a person" experience though it's a mess, starting with the way the word Team is so overloaded, it has several different meanings within the Teams application. There's very few other places where its so apparent that a piece of software is bunch of other products all mashed together and shipped as fast as possible - you've got Sharepoint in there, Office, Skype for Business, and very little consideration seems to have gone into how to make all of those work together seamlessly.

You're not doing it wrong, if anything I'm genuinely happy for you.

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.