Microsoft Teams is now available on Linux

Dot.Net needs to be done with Mono on Linux or via Wine (yeah there is Dot.Net core but I never saw it in action in any meaningful way and I assume it only has a subset of all that stuff which is included into Dot.Net since it is called "core"). Which also makes me think of the quoted statement by M$. That Teams for Linux has all the "core" features. Sounds like another Skype for Linux thing to me.

I'm not a .NET developer, so I'm not an authority on the subject, but I know our Microsoft teams are developing most of their applications with .NET Core deployed on Linux these days, so I assume it has most/all of the features that .NET has.

And what's about Windows Defender ATP coming to Linux? Who the f*ck cares about it on Linux at all? For me it looks like they just doing this to make some uneducated people installing it on their Linux box to see what applications they running and what they are doing on their system.

This is actually a big deal in enterprise; it's just not primarily for Linux desktop users. Any service that supports file upload/download usually has to implement some sort of service for scanning files for viruses, to make sure the recipient on the other end doesn't get infected. There's already ClamAV, which also supports Linux, but more options is a good thing.

DirectX, Microsoft Office (and maybe a shady contract with Adobe) are still a great source of revenue for then. Opening any of this would be a great shoot in the foot for Windows and big loss of money from "gamers"/companies/designers, so don't expect then to support a multi platform project like Vulkan until DirectX (or Windows as we know today) become financially "irrelevant".

It's not really about the money (DirectX). It's about controlling the developers, i.e. mindshare. As long as developers are stuck with MS lock-in, it's costly for them to release anything for other platforms. I.e. it's not like MS will get less money if they would, but their competitors will get more benefits, and that they don't want. It's a dirty anti-competitive tactic.


Last edited by Shmerl on 10 December 2019 at 9:08 pm UTC

Teams is pretty bad though

It's not bad, it's an atrocity! At work we're phasing out Skype for Business (aka Lync) in favor of Teams, and I thought that was pretty bad. But compared to Teams it's high quality software. Teams bears no semblance to any sort of desktop application and adheres to no desktop UI/UX convention whatsoever. And on top of that it's a memory hog. I mean, neither Eclipse nor Visual Studio require that much RAM!

To recap the master goals:
- nobody installs software any more, it's all cloud
- most consumers will not use PCs, but closed appliances
- PC gaming in its current form dies

Will any of this happen as planned? Maybe, maybe not. But even Valve is preparing for this possibility.

That's some of my concerns that makes against Stadia or streaming in general depending on who is behind it. I am pretty certain both Microsoft and Google would love to make streaming only option to play games if they could (Xbox One backpedal). With Valve I am in doubt, I think they would give users the choice to have local and streaming.

Further elaboration but off topic

Spoiler, click me

It's frustrating to read people gloat about Stadia being so good and those against it are somehow dumb. Example is the circle post of "No downloads, just right into game". Yes, but good connection scales to downloading as well. Have that and you will spend less time waiting. Many people have good reasons for why Stadia is not good thing. They, Stadia supporters who gloat, are perfectly willing to exchange their control of their games or/and software and seemingly ignorant of the implications it has not for PC in general but to other people who would rather enjoy games locally.

Dot.Net needs to be done with Mono on Linux or via Wine (yeah there is Dot.Net core but I never saw it in action in any meaningful way and I assume it only has a subset of all that stuff which is included into Dot.Net since it is called "core").

.Net Core is actually pretty nice by itself. The project structure, the tooling, the web framework (ASP.Net Core) are all much more sane than the classic .Net, and much nicer to work with. It's not really a subset, but a different implementation that exists in parallel, with it's own set of technologies. Therefore it's not a drop-in replacement.

There are actually 3 different implementations of .Net: .Net Framework, .Net Core, and Mono. As a developer you can either target one of them or target .Net Standard, which is a common subset that all 3 frameworks implement.

As long as you target a specific .Net Standard version, the code is very portable. The problem is that there's still a lot of stuff not covered by the standard, and it is very tempting to just target the classic .Net Framework, mix in some binary libs for good measure, and the whole "standard" thing gets tossed out the window.

It's a bit of a mess right now, but I have worked on several .Net projects on Linux, and it was relatively painless. You only need Windows if you are doing some deep integration with something like Microsoft Office or Windows API's. Considering that most of that stuff is being replaced by Azure services, Windows is becoming less and less relevant.


Last edited by Linas on 10 December 2019 at 9:41 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.


Last edited by Shmerl on 10 December 2019 at 9:42 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.

Yes, we do need to care. Same as we need to care about any application/game a lot of people use, that isn't available easily on Linux. Every single one is a barrier that can prevent people from sticking with Linux. We can make as many big steps on performance, ease of install and updating and so on - all junk unless what people want and regularly use is on Linux. Steps like this are important. Anyone who disagrees, frankly has their head firmly in a bubble.

I'm not a .NET developer, so I'm not an authority on the subject, but I know our Microsoft teams are developing most of their applications with .NET Core deployed on Linux these days, so I assume it has most/all of the features that .NET has.

.NET Core 2 had probably about 90% of the .NET Framework features and was mostly missing Windows-centric stuff, like the user interface bits and pieces. They've implemented those on top of NET Core 3 now, but they're still Windows only. Mostly, I guess, because the .NET Framework proper will no longer see any (major) new (language) features, so .NET Core is the only path forward. But they're also going to drop "Core" and simply call the next version .NET 5. But I don't expect that to be truly cross-platform either.

Yes, we do need to care. Same as we need to care about any application/game a lot of people use, that isn't available easily on Linux. Every single one is a barrier that can prevent people from sticking with Linux. We can make as many big steps on performance, ease of install and updating and so on - all junk unless what people want and regularly use is on Linux. Steps like this are important. Anyone who disagrees, frankly has their head firmly in a bubble.

As a Linux user, I actually find such examples damaging. I look at the IM situation globally, and it's not a Linux specific issue. E-mail managed to push through the federated approach, and only because it happened years ago, we are now lucky we can send e-mail from any server to any server.

IM is a horror story in comparison. Walled garden servers and services grow like mushrooms, and almost none of them can talk to each other. Attempts to advance federated approaches (XMPP and now Matrix) are met with total indifference from the greedy owners of the walled options.


Last edited by Shmerl on 10 December 2019 at 10:26 pm UTC

It's not really about the money (DirectX). It's about controlling the developers, i.e. mindshare. As long as developers are stuck with MS lock-in, it's costly for them to release anything for other platforms. I.e. it's not like MS will get less money if they would, but their competitors will get more benefits, and that they don't want. It's a dirty anti-competitive tactic.

Yes, which is why Phil Spencer is "right" in the business point of view for defending MS lock-in (even if it's bad for anyone else).

Now if we talk about Apple, I think they were stupid to come with an exclusive api without having a big base of developers already using it before.

Yes, which is why Phil Spencer is "right" in the business point of view for defending MS lock-in (even if it's bad for anyone else).

Now if we talk about Apple, I think they were stupid to come with an exclusive api without having a big base of developers already using it before.

Anti-competitive tricks is not the right way to do business. It's the dirty way. I.e. proper way is competition on merit. In fact, anti-competitive behavior should be prevented by proper anti-trust (competition laws), because it's damaging to the progress and market in general.

And yes, I agree Apple are even worse. They are one of the most disgusting examples of lock-in proponents today.

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.

Nice, but they could port Direct X to linux hahaha

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.

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.

Yeah sorry WorMzy but I fail to understand why you don't like GTK3 itself. GTK2/3 and Gnome2/3 are different things.
Just because you hate the Gnome devs, you hate GTK3 too?

I hate the Gnome 3 desktop too (it feel like a tablet or something, so boring to not have many configurations available at start etc), I use XFCE. But maybe I don't know some important things about it, and I'm not a dev myself.
Or rather, why Qt is better than GTK3?

This is good news. I use Teams at work with Trello to communicate progress on projects with some of the guys. We are too cheap for JIRA. Ive been forced to use the web client, which only works in Firefox, which ain't a browser that I use for anything else, so this eliminates that. I'm happy about this.

I'm not a .NET developer, so I'm not an authority on the subject, but I know our Microsoft teams are developing most of their applications with .NET Core deployed on Linux these days, so I assume it has most/all of the features that .NET has.

Not all the way there yet, but they are getting much closer. The current Windows-only .NET is going away with the next, fully cross-platform, release:
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-net-5/

Yes, we do need to care. Same as we need to care about any application/game a lot of people use, that isn't available easily on Linux. Every single one is a barrier that can prevent people from sticking with Linux. We can make as many big steps on performance, ease of install and updating and so on - all junk unless what people want and regularly use is on Linux. Steps like this are important. Anyone who disagrees, frankly has their head firmly in a bubble.

As a Linux user, I actually find such examples damaging. I look at the IM situation globally, and it's not a Linux specific issue. E-mail managed to push through the federated approach, and only because it happened years ago, we are now lucky we can send e-mail from any server to any server.

IM is a horror story in comparison. Walled garden servers and services grow like mushrooms, and almost none of them can talk to each other. Attempts to advance federated approaches (XMPP and now Matrix) are met with total indifference from the greedy owners of the walled options.

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.

While my attitude to Microsoft has definitely softened over the last decade, and I do see it as a positive not being forced to use Windows for 1 or 2 applications that may have been forced on you by your client / employer, I will remain hugely skeptical of their 'love linux' motives until I stop hearing about this sh*t.

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).