Microsoft Teams is now available on Linux

Wow, Microsoft is being so good to Linux. Almost like they're... hugging us. A tender and loving embrace, I'm sure.

It sounds like the abusive relationship cycle---abuse, reconciliation, honeymoon period, rinse and repeat ...


Last edited by Nanobang on 11 December 2019 at 12:32 pm UTC

Don't underestimate how big a deal this is for enterprise, a very important market as far as the desktop is concerned. Between this and Citrix I am almost at a point where I could use my linux PC for work given how many of our tools are online.

Completely agree. The real point that a few people have missed is that there will always be a better option for chats, calls, collaboration and office suite with native Linux apps if we are considering just the personal use. The Linux support for Microsoft Teams is pretty much designed for those B2B or Corporate scenarios where Linux users can chat, share the screen and collaborate on documents with Windows users.

My case is similar: when I'm travelling with my personal Linux laptop I usually connect to my Company's Windows Terminal Desktop. I could probably find Teams for Linux a good solution for not logging at all on the WTD in the first place.


Last edited by LordDaveTheKind on 11 December 2019 at 4:43 pm UTC

Anyway, do we need to care about Teams? Just another proprietary, non federated, walled garden IM service, that's not solving but proliferating the problem of IM fragmentation. Matrix is much better approach.

For personal use no, we don't. For a B2B/Corporate collaboration scenario where all the employees are using Microsoft products as a standard de facto, yes we do.

Meh, uses gtk3. I'll keep running teams at work on a Windows client.

Why you don't like GTK3? What would you prefer instead?

Mostly historical reasons -- I'm still bitter that the gnome devs just unceremoniously threw gnome2 out the window and said that everyone should use the monstrosity that is gnome3 instead.
I also particularly don't like Gnome devs hostile attitude towards end users who don't want to use their defaults, their tendency to break themes every six months (allegedly they've stopped doing this now?), and them telling application devs that they should only have code for gtk/gnome-specific "features" (instead of coding for multiple DEs), etc..

What I prefer instead is anything that isn't gtk3. Like I said, I'd rather run a Windows application than a native Linux gtk3 app.

I too can't stand Gnome3. So instead I use Mate and occasionally Cinnamon . . . both of which, I believe, use gtk3. So I feel you're throwing out the baby with the bathwater there.

My view is that it isn't bathwater, it's epoxy resin. The two things are too tightly tied together -- GTK3 is developed by gnome for gnome. They don't care if cinnamon breaks every six months because they changed all the library functions, so long as gnome keeps working. I don't want to deal with gnome's shit, so I don't use gtk3. I'm not attached to that "baby", so I'm not going to waste my time trying to separate it from the "bathwater".

Or rather, why Qt is better than GTK3?

I don't know, and I don't care which is better, and I don't want to get into that debate; I just don't allow gtk3 on my systems and actively avoid applications that use it (unless I can recompile them to use something else).

I don't know about Cinnamon but as I said I'm using XFCE which use GTK3 but I don't see any breaks when updating, and I don't remember having one.
It's clearly your choice but it seems not really solid to me.
But yeah it's very off topic.


Last edited by Cyril on 11 December 2019 at 7:39 pm UTC

That's why we use Linux.

Speak for yourself.

Of course, what I really want is for Office to stop shitting all over standards and making their files incompatible with every other software.

Same, I’m a lot more interested in Microsoft opening up their standards or switching to open standards than in installing their software on Linux. I like LibreOffice just fine but it still shits the bed when I receive MS Office files with frames and absolute-positioned content.

They do use open standards. Office Open XML (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx) are an international standard, due to much lobbying by Microsoft.

But Microsoft doesn't properly follow the standards, saving the documents in a wrong version of the format, and thus ruining compatibility.

I am old enough to remember MS policy of Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish. I am glad they are working with Linux more, but I still don't trust MS. Their policies are a huge reason of why I have embraced open source software as much as I have.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

Regardless of the issues surrounding collab/IM clients like this, my point was still pretty clear. If a lot of people use them, we need them available on Linux and I'm sure you fully understand this.

It looks Web based, so browser should be good enough. Their client is likely a wrapped browser engine anyway.

My views on proliferation of such stuff though is like those of Eben Moglen.


Last edited by Shmerl on 16 December 2019 at 3:47 am UTC