Starting today, Microsoft Teams is available for Linux users in public preview, enabling high quality collaboration experiences for the open source community at work and in educational institutions. ...
Updated Nov 09, 2023
Version 4.0
Blog Post
> Cool that Linux users now also have Teams available. But why do you steer away from distributing Teams with modern package solutions? Like Snap or Flatpak for Linux, or Microsoft Store for Windows? That I'd like to know.
1) Not everybody can install Snap or Flatpak because of stupid systemd dependencies. Virtually everybody can install Debs or RPMs. Those who can't can use alien to convert a Deb or RPM to a tarball. If this were "steered away from traditional package formats" then I would not have bothered installing this.
2) Linux users have always had Teams "available" if they used the website.
3) And it looks as if this client is nothing but a cut-down Chrome. Run it, look in your process table for the "teams" executable. It runs with command-line options that are right out of the Chrome command line options list. It has a user agent that reports itself as "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) MicrosoftTeams-Preview/1.2.00.32451 Chrome/69.0.3497.128 Electron/4.2.12 Safari/537.36". It's a browser, that's it.
4) And yet, fascinating irony. If you click a link in Teams, it doesn't spawn a new window to open the page, it calls your default browser.
Why am I now running two browsers? What was the point of this?