When I had a contract which required me to use Teams I was exploring installing it on a server and just using VNC to access it.

The solution I've settled on however is to just reject contracts where terrible software is mandatory unless there's a significant financial upside.

I do have a Windows 10 PC for crapware which I connect using RDP. RDP on gigabit LAN is fast enough to watch a video with acceptable results. It can also pipe webcam and microphone to the remote host.

For Linux hosts NoMachine is really fast and can make use of stuff like x265 streaming. The open source x2go although slower can publish applications terminal services style in a way that the remote app window looks like its running on the local machine.

Huh, is x2go faster than standard x11 forwarding? I played around with forwarding from Linux VMs to my host Mac via XQuartz, and even running on the same machine it was much too slow for e.g. web browsing.

I'd say it can be made faster because you can control the streaming quality and compression algorithms.

Woah NoMachine is still around?! I used to use that to login to home from uni in 2003 (well it was freenx but same diff)

My main tool to login to my Linux workstations. Works like a charm.

For what it's worth, Teams was a pain on MacBook but it's running fine now that I can work with a desktop (32GB, Ryzen 3700X). I completely agree on Teams being by far the worst software I have to use though.

In my project most PMs have the mid-tier Macs (not sure what they are called). They can't use Teams video conferencing and Jira at the same time. Some have resorted to running Teams on a tablet next to the laptop, which works well unless you need to share the screen. It's a pretty ridiculous situation.

Yep, I see the same problems. Since our PMs never needed beefy machines before (they don't do software development and Teams is new for us), I'm the one who ends up being the JIRA pilot :)

The fun part is that I could be using my personal stone-age 2GB/i3 MB Air if I were doing only development and e-mail.

Teams is really just awful. Lync/Skype for Business generally ran with 10% of the memory usage that Teams uses, and it wasn't a particularly well-written native WPF app.

Use an iPad. Teams app is smooth there. And you’ll have a better camera.

That's actually a great idea.

I used to use an iPad for email, calendar and Jira. Maybe I should go back to it!