Teams sucks on Linux, here's what to do

10 points by raffraffraff ↗ HN
Rant time, with a tip.

My company use Teams because it's bundled with office 365. I use Linux. Microsoft released a beta Teams app for Linux, but I had lots of issues with it so I started using Teams in the browser.

Slightly better, but my whole browser would occasionally crash (OOM on a 16gb Ryzen laptop). Thank eff for restoring tabs. Since Firefox is my default browser I installed Chromium for Teams. Occasionally Chromium would crash. Fine. But sometimes the whole laptop would grind to a halt as Chromium sucked up a few GB of RAM and my machine would swap itself to death. The OOM killer doesn't always save you, and sometimes you need to hold a pillow over the laptop's face for 5s... (shhhhh, it'll all be over soon). First thing I did here was enable SysRq kill (disabled by default on a lot of distros) so I could force an OOM immediately to stop the machine from swapping myself to death.

But stability got worse over the last few months, and recently Istarted getting a warning the Teams classic was being discontinued. And MS have also discontinued the Linux app and pulled it from the repo.

Someone told me they're was a fix! "Just append'v2' to the URL!" But this had no effect in any browser on Linux. So is this it? Can I not use Teams on Linux any more??

A colleague said "try changing your browser agent to Chrome + Windows 10".

Lol, said I. Microsoft don't hate Linux any more! Except... it friggin' worked. Teams happily "upgraded" and now works, if I lie and tell it I'm using Windows.

Badly done Microsoft. Badly done.

4 comments

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I daily drive a Linux phone. The number of websites that require me to lie to them and tell them I’m on an iPhone is staggering.
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