MS Teams Linux client is being retired. To be replaced by a progressive web app
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.
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.
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.
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:
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:
System notifications for chat and channel Dock icon with respective controls Application auto-start Easy access to system app permissions When will this happen?
We plan to make Microsoft Teams PWA on Linux generally available in the coming months.
How will this affect me?
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.
What do you need to do to prepare?
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.
175 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 206 ms ] threadIn 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.
Jitsi, Meet, and others work flawlessly by comparison.
perhaps joining calls from a convex combination of browsers might give you the least-worst results
Where do you see a problem?
I use MS Teams (Preview) on Linux. It's good enough for chat, doco sharing and other stuff it does. I don't give a crap about galleries, reactions and whatnot.
Can only assume you are on Mac where Outlook is a fisher price knockoff for some reason.
It can also be a symptom of other organizational dysfunction.
For tech companies, especially startups, it's something we should consider before joining: how does the company determine the tools/infrastructure that engineering and production use, and what are the current determinations?
You can see it here: https://ubuntu.pkgs.org/20.04/microsoft-prod-amd64/intune-po...
If you don't have IPv6 on your network it just makes an address up and then tries to route everything through it because IPv6 has precedence.
And of course the sysctl to disable IPv6 doesn't work under WSL. It took me 30 mins just to fix that and that was straight out of the box.
I don't know why I'd want all the windows baggage on my Linux laptop.
Anyway, doesn't WSL2 mount Windows volumes over Samba?
> netsh interface set interface "vEthernet (WSL)" disable
then run again with enable.
A few years ago I got a new laptop, and booted windows so I could download a Debian installer. The first-time Windows setup was full of telemetry and other crap that would have needed to be turned off, and then I immediately started seeing ads for Edge and other crap showing up. It was disgusting.
I'm like, uh, really? No. By this point I've had to "teach out of the book" so much I'm used to it, COVID has happened so half my class is working from home anyways... I pretty much just work around my IT department any chance I can. I bought a System76 laptop just so I don't have to request software upgrades and installs every other semester.
If they gave two shits about Linux, this would be working just fine. Now they're gonna push Linux users to use Edge, then probably abandon that pile.
The Slack and Discord apps for Windows and Mac are also fine, where the Teams Electron-based client also sucks.
I’m expecting [no hard evidence to this] the full Office will be on top of Edge’s Webview2 soonish.
You can see how it's built on layers and layers of badly designed compatibility layers and bad engineering decisions.
Massive CPU hog, unacceptable side effects (disconnecting Bluetooth devices), super laggy UI and overall poor UX are the headlines.
I decided to invest in an alternative VC platform for my business because it was that bad.
It just feels brittle and flaky and awkward. Even small things like trying to insert an image often won't work because the format is unsupported so you have to screenshot the image first.
In 2022 there is no excuse to not support all the common image formats, it's not hard
I've always associated VC with venture capital... VC as videoconferencing threw me for a loop real quick
This is on a machine that is dedicated to teams and has nothing else running on it. It's got it's own monitor, is always in the foreground, and is something I can always see from my desk.
That, and my calendar no longer shows the time bar. So, I can see all my meetings, but I have to guess based on distance where in the day it's actually scheduled.
It's most definitely anti-productive to be using this.
Sure is a step forward from the 90s with digital desk phones where you just pressed a speed dial and connected instantly.
Just take some Sharepoint and Exchange sprinkle over some Electron dust and you have a new platform.
Yes it is a pile of dung like Lotus Notes but fortunately for them Covid came out at the same time and customers needed a WFH solution that would not cost $$$.
Maybe one day google wave.. or google plus... or google buzz will take off.
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.)
On your other hand, apps like Discord are completely broken on modern Wayland systems. Discord's team never bothered to fix it, so now the only "native" way to use Discord is in Chromium. You could characterize that as a regression, but I'm perfectly happy with fully featured webapps as an alternative to misbehaving native apps.
MS can do it. Look at VS Code.
It's strange how they make some of the very best electron apps and also some of the worst (teams sucks on windows and Mac too and I don't see how their new edge-electron will fix that because it's also just a rebadged chrome just like electron)
The problem with teams isn't electron. It's the project management that prioritizes new features over making the existing ones work smoothly. The web version won't solve this as it's simply the same thing.
By itself it is already a huge suid executable that is almost impossible to verify. The MS idea of it is also a huge suid executable that you must download as a binary from MS and is contractually prohibited from verifying.
I don't disagree that native apps should be a goal, but what does it matter with a video call app? Even Apple knew they had to throw in the towel here, Facetime can call direct-to-web now. Arguably, Microsoft's reluctance to make a good Skype webapp could be cited as one of the reasons for it's demise. Who knows, maybe we'd all be Skyping people still if Microsoft didn't wait until 2019 for a truly nice PWA. It won't save Teams as a product, but it would be a fine way to salvage it as an application.
If you want an attractive groupware tool, it has to work on everyone's system. If you want an attractive IDE/text editor, it has to be the best for that specific system. These two goals, markets and products are completely distinct. By recognizing this dichotomy, I think they're strengthening their product lineup.
Meanwhile something useful like maybe caching the stupid emoji and reaction images so they don't lag every time isn't fixed.
But you're right. The saying is true. "Microsoft is better at talking to your boss than you are."
At most, we got one electron app that can get rid off, while at the same time get a guarantee to have the same feature as other systems.
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.
Edit: baffling downvote?
Edit: the Adobe website claims you can do form fill and sign of PDFs from within a browser, but it's never worked for me. Recently had to initial every page of a 78-page PDF, which my fairly beefy machine struggled a bit with (it was truly painful on my partner's lower spec machine), I'm curious how feasible that would be in a browser.
The non-nerds also absolutely notice when some stupid Electron chat app makes their laptop hot and takes their battery life from 16 hours to 2.5 hours (ahem, Discord when using voice and/or video chat). Proponents of that tech claim normal users don't notice, but 1) they definitely, 100% do, and 2) more than one might think are even able to figure out which app, specifically, is responsible, not just "my machine's slow and battery's dying fast and I don't know why" (it's usually not exactly rocket science).
My system tray has Slack, Discord, Teams, and VLC pretty much all the time. My taskbar often gets rather loaded with how I switch between workflows, and I've already got the Outlook PWA stuck there doing nothing. I was really hoping I could eventually have a native Outlook electron app (I feel a bit iffy installing a third party solution), but instead I'm gaining another app that sits there 90% of the time doing nothing.
Also what is up with Microsoft's redirect-through-15-domains authentication. Completely unreasonable for anyone that has their browser set up securely.
Really?
For a while I have contemplated creating a lightweight native version of Teams. According to the Teams API it should be possible, I believe
It can simply be c#, no need to go any deeper. But it would be a huge boost in performance
[1] https://blog.opercom.co.uk/posts/news-13-08-22/
[2] https://www.opercom.co.uk/contact
MS certainly is using WPF in some areas (Dynamics 365 client framework comes to mind)
Every time I watch the WinUI community talk it seems like trying to sell us the platform, after all the mismanagment with UWP.
The sad part is when asked about why features X, Y, Z from Forms or WPF still aren't coming in WinUI, they mostly react as if hearing about the said feature for the first time. That is how well the team knows the frameworks they are trying to replace.
WinUI3 good news: it's open source! You can see it on github.
Bad news: it's only just made 1.0, and because it's on github you can see that the team devoted to it is absolutely tiny.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/safari-browser-su...
It's the same in Edge on Windows lol. Their own shit doesn't work on their own shit.
So edgeview2 is basically windows only for now, and any future port will mean they'll have to maintain multiplatform support. And guess this announcement implies that they won't port it to Linux. But why do away with the "free" multiplatform compatibility of electron? The official reason was for increased performance, but it's hard to see how electron was the bottleneck considering how badly Teams run even compared to your average electron app. I mean Microsoft has built the best performing electron app I've ever used, vscode!
I'm probably missing something though, and I'm sure there are tons of good reasons for going the edge webview route, but it's still pretty confusing to me!
They were planning on maybe releasing the linux port around the end of 2021, as they were prioritizing the mac port first.
But I don’t think even the mac port has been released yet... So it kind of makes sense for the Teams team (ha!) to just not bother with a linux release if the runtime they are developing on isn't even on the release roadmap yet. Though I guess that makes the switch from electron even more confusing.
https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/645
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/teams...
https://twitter.com/TandonRish/status/1408085784016539653?
There's this uncertainty that's big enough for me to stick to a Macbook when working.
Other than that, I haven't seen significant sound or video issues during meetings either on my personal or work devices, and it would seem to be specific to Teams. My recent experience using a Linux desktop for work is only from the last few months, though.
As always with Linux and peripherals, your mileage will probably depend a lot on the hardware.
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.
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.
We're happy to extend an HN discount to any interested teams or answer any questions. Just email me at akash@tandem.chat.