One day they just completely fucked the ability to paste code. It worked flawlessly before and then suddenly it removes indenting, bugs out and doesn't let you exit the preformatted code block. It's so bugged, it's like they didn't even test it. They couldn't have, one day it literally worked fine and the next it was unusable and could be replicated every single time.

And why there isn't the ability to just delete the rich text formatting and write markdown I do not know. They can't build a bug free rich text editor or one with intuitive controls. It's the same problem I have with Jira, the rich text editor just does not work like it should.

The latest Teams bug I've encountered is an inability to write a bulleted list with more than one bullet. Each newline splits the list into a new message. No combination of Shift/Ctrl/Alt + Enter worked.

This changed, as in broke, around a week ago. At least for me, on Win 11.

Edit: Just remembered another Teams bug from a few days ago: cut text from the middle of paragraph, paste it back in earlier in the same paragraph, ... and it appears in a smaller font.

For the list-bug, there is a workaround I think, if you go into the "Edit-mode" (or whatever it's called) where Enter won't immediately send the message, having multiple bullet points (by using Enter) still works.

But yeah, it's really silly how they manage to break things like this. One would think they have a test-suite specifically for their shitty editor to prevent things like this - apparently not the case. Welp.

It's not yet skype-levels of bad, where doing _anything_ beyond simple text was impossible, but it seems they're slowly getting their, update by update.

For me and my team CTRL+A randomly stops working for an hour. It happens every single day randomly for different members. Just mind-boggling BS every day with Teams.

My Android client randomly signs me out, sometimes multiple times per day.

Here's my "it's not stupid if it works" fix (that doesn't involve restarting Teams). Click on any message in a chat, click CTRL- (or CMD-) A, and congrats, select all works again. Please don't read this as a defense of Teams -- I'm just another frustrated user.

THANK YOU, I couldn't figure out why sometimes it would work and sometimes it wouldn't.

Exactly. This completely frustrated me out. How many times I hit enter and sent the msg instead of creaing a new list item?

This can be remidiated by using the editor mode, albeit I found it frustrating still.

Yes. This is horrible. The horrible workaround is Ctl-Shift-X shortcut to bring up the more advanced editor that lets you selected bulleted lists.

I like playing the "can I paste an image in today or not?" game - sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes I have to open the web version to do it, other times not ...

If somebody sends me an image, I can click on the thumbnail and open it full-size about once in five attempts. Usually it will just open up to a blank screen and fail to load the image.

The image thing is the most frustrating one. Most of the time someone sends me an image, I can see it in the chat, but as I click on it, the Teams UI bugs out and displays nothing.

For a six month five people in our office couldn’t use the desktop client. Video meetings just didn’t work on the Mac.

These bugs and regressions are so bad that I'm convinced no one at MS actually uses Teams.

Oh ye a code snippet I sent in Teams made me wreck our deployment system.

Teams put a nobreak space or something in the code that looked like a ordinary space in the diff. I am still abit mad :)

Oh Teams started doing this too now? This was that one thing that made me absolutely hate Skype (other than being utter garbage in general) and that at least worked so far in Teams...

Looks like all commercial chat-software is destined to become terrible garbage, one A/B-test at a time.

It was like a year ago.

If I remember correctly, there is some difference between voice call chat rooms and the instant messaging chat rooms. I don't remember which messed up whitespace. Or if I copied between chats etc.

Can't trust the text anyhow.

I fully agree. I literally never felt this much hate and contempt for software as I do when I'm forced to use Teams every day. It's an absolute shitshow of a chat. And when I thought it couldn't get worse, they f*ked up ctrl+a selecting all text on Windows... I work in MS ecosystem, some MS products are great, some are really bad, most are ok-ish, but Teams is on a whole another level of bad.

Then I presume you never had the misfortune of using Skype for Business?

We used this prior to Teams, and in comparison, Teams is great. I'm guessing a lot of Teams users come from Skype for Business, so they are really happy with the improvements.

Skype for Business was incredible next to Teams. Lightweight client (even though it was WPF), developer SDK that actually provided basic chat functionality, notifications that didn't automatically get lost in the scrum. I miss it a lot.

The server infrastructure was a bit of a shitshow, if you ever had to maintain an on-premise deployment, and it must have been a complete clusterfuck to run the Skype for Business Online SAAS service they were offering. So I can understand why they did away with it, but I'm still very irritated that this many years into Teams, it's such an unfinished mess...

SfB only did the non-persistent chat and A/V calls portion of Teams and is really more like a VoIP PBX. SfB calls still have better audio quality than Teams today - I'm guessing they've optimized bandwidth down to meet a "2/5 star rating" ("technically intelligible").

Ctrl + A is also broken on Mac. Quite surprised to see it is broken on Windows as well

The audio/video part of Teams is almost flawless for me up to, say, 20 people. I was actually impressed with how well they handle multiple devices - joining a meeting from a phone and laptop at the same time, or moving from one to the other is done in the best possible way.

Everything else is horrible - note taking is useless, the chat is full of visual noise and slow, the calendar is mostly useless and takes too long to update, file sharing is infamously convoluted etc.

We currently use Slack for chat and Teams for audio/video calls and I quite like this setup. Slack is absolutely horrible for audio/video calls, so moving to it entirely is a no-go, hope the company will keep being ok to pay for both.

To me teams appears that only one person can be heard talking at a time (bit hard to describe, someone can interrupt but it seems like there's some kind of limitation as to who is being heard). On the other hand on Google meet I noticed that conversation sounds closer to a normal meeting.

Both have great sound quality other than that.

Linux version:

- some times the left arrow to move the cursor doesn't work

- some times images are displayed and others not

- can't have more than 4 people on screen in a video call

- the scroll is completely broken

- can't get out of the immersive mode without closing the process (the back arrow doesn't work)

And the list goes on and on...

"some times the left arrow to move the cursor doesn't work". Same bug in Windows. Select the button with the three dots "...", and hit escape when the menu pops up. Arrow key will start working again.

My biggest issues are that a) it starts up in the foreground (none of my other autostart apps do this) so it can happily intercept keypresses you're doing in other apps -- and b) it does not respect standard system titlebar / borders, which puts it as the only app in my KDE environment that works in a non-standard manner.

A/V issues, navigation, inability to find an existing conversation / conference (happening now on another computer) on a GNU/Linux machine, etc are almost secondary.

> My biggest issues are that a) it starts up in the foreground (none of my other autostart apps do this) so it can happily intercept keypresses you're doing in other apps

I needed to change my work password twice already because I accidentally sent it to somebody when Teams suddenly popped up and took focus away from my VPN client and I hit enter.

> it does not respect standard system titlebar / borders, which puts it as the only app in my KDE environment that works in a non-standard manner.

This also makes it impossible to resize the window. Well, sometimes. There are times when it works, and I have no idea what makes it work.

Thankfully, I usually use Qubes OS which doesn't let programs do these user-hostile things.

> This also makes it impossible to resize the window.

As a workaround, I'm pretty sure that KDE supports Alt (or meta) + right click for resizing.

KDE lets you resize compliant windows in this way, but Microsoft Teams for GNU/Linux is not compliant -- and consequently this does not work.

You can outright prohibit applications from starting on the foreground on KDE.

I wouldn't even try running Teams on Linux, as I'm sure it's an endless source of frustration (much more intense than on Windows or on the browser). But the one nice thing of Linux is that you can force apps to behave.

> can't have more than 4 people on screen in a video call

You can if you use it in Chrome. I thought Teams was an Electron application, which makes this even more strange.

I have all of these issues as well on macOS. The left-arrow is typically the most frustrating one to me.

Not Linux-specific! The Windows version suffers from at least 1, 2 and 4 in my experience.

It somehow tries to change my camera settings as well, fucking them up in the process.

As a cross platform desktop app developer I hate desktop linux. So many reinventions of the wheel that you have to support. Graphics, sound, video capture, GUI is all a mess.

Can you elaborate more? What would you prefer instead, with regards to developing for Linux?

There is X and now wayland. If you are doing something beyond basic you can quickly fall into needing two different implementations for GUI things.

There is jack, pulse, alsa and now pipewire for sound. On the system you can have multiple sound devices some available fully working only through pipewire, others fully working only through pulse.

If you want your app to integrate into your desktop nicely (basic thing like using tray icons) you can have completely different behaviors on different distros because there is so much variability.

Pipewire is now taking over a lot of things regarding audio/video. With fedora already fully on it. Great but the documentation is in a miserable state. Very few examples. Some distros while have pipewire running, using it for audio will just not work.

Understandable. It would be nice if a lot of the Linux DE were consolidated, at least for a "target" for developers. I'm genuinely hoping SteamOS 3 helps with this. Of course, this consolidation will come with issues as well, as we've seen with the dominance of the Chromium engine for browsers...

I definitely agree with this sentiment in terms of general UX and performance. I can't find a lot of messages and files that I'm looking for because it's so badly structured. And it has a very noticeable lag whenever I perform any function (clicking on "Activity" out of "Chat" for example).

The only good thing about it is video calling. Without testing this, I always feel it's much faster/smoother and has better screen sharing quality. Also the launch screen does a great job (in comparison to Zoom for example)

I must have used worse software, but not something that I can remember. The problem with Teams is that for all it’s flaws, I can pick an alternative. Clients expect Teams and are always surprised that we don’t really use it internally.

Video call on Teams is actually pretty good, but everything else just seems half-baked, thrown together without a plan. The GUI is non-intuitive, basic features are unstable, absent or hidden away. Work for a company that doesn’t use ActiveDirectory and Exchange… well now your in for at really bad time.

> Work for a company that doesn’t use ActiveDirectory and Exchange… well now your in for at really bad time.

Another way to think of it is that the deep integration to AD and Exchange is the major reason IT departments like Teams. The video and audio calling is fine, the chat works, although it seems to annoy Slack users. The meeting calendar syncs with Exchange. Planner boards give a simple Kanban setup. File storage with Sharepoint and Onedrive integration mean that the stored files work almost like they are on my computer.

It’s among the worst I’m currently using, at the very least. The most amusing part is that you never feel like you’re on solid ground: given the app’s complexity, there is always some exotic new problem to be discovered at the least convenient time.

At least the audio is consistently good, though.

> A room full of monkeys on a typewriter would never create something as bad as teams.

Monkeys could barely create software if at all. That means you have set a low badness bar for Teams to surpass.

What if they were using GitHub copilot?

I see you haven't used WebEx Spaces or Google Meet yet! Meet doesn't even have a desktop application! Of course you won't get reliable video unless you use Chrome.

Teams is not great, but for an enterprise-tier collaboration solution that can do chat, voice, telephony, and video, it's better than its alternatives. It's far better than its predecessor, Skype for Business (fka Lync).

YMMV, for my use cases it seems to work really well. I wonder if your instance has been heavily "customized" with group policy, or something.

Given the alternative for us would be slack+zoom+gsuite, which all have impressively daunting privacy concerns as well as pretty crappy usability themselves, I (and the people I am collaborating with regularly) am really happy with Teams.

Second only to Azure dev oops. Next in line is Jira... why do corporations love this kind of software?

These kinds of software are really good at having answers for “what-about”isms, so it doesn’t matter that the subjective experience is bad. For any objective “what-about” in terms of integration story or security story or whatever, they have a thousand different answers that can be applied, so the purchaser will always be convinced that all potential issues are addressed.

The endless branching feature list also results in broken spaghetti code that creates a horrible subjective and inconsistent experience.

I haven't been able to reliably click on images in chat for six months.

Lync was worse.

Oh, I remember how Lync had different maximum message lengths for the first message in a conversation vs subsequent ones. I believe it was using SIP internally and sending your first chat message in a "begin call" workflow, but it was always unpredictable when a new "call" would start or not. Horrible kludgey solutions...

I want lync back. I'm no longer 20, my eyes demand that I zoom everything in and then features disappear