Same, love Zulip but slack seems too entrenched at the moment. I'm hoping that OSS communities continue adopting it and using it instead of slack though.

Meanwhile in Europe, where Slack never made much of a dent, Teams seems to be eating everything.

... which is frustrating, because its Linux desktop app is still quite poor and buggy in the basics.

I might be living in a different Europe than you but from what I see around my Slack is very pervasive and Teams is only used for video meetings because companies are already on office365.

Nothing but hate for the chat/collaboration features…

It really depends on which company you're in.

Big companies where IT is considered a cost center and day-to-day users have no say in their tools will be using Teams, partly because they have no choice but also because for a lot of them the standard is already Windows and "Skype For Business" and they legitimately don't know how much better other tools are.

In smaller companies where day-to-day users have a say in their tools, Teams would absolutely not fly, especially when said users most likely have experience with better tools such as Slack.

If I'm being honest, Teams and Slack are both about as bad as each other. Threading in Slack in particular is so bad as to be an active productivity killer.

There seem to be quite a few Europes around. The one I live in uses mostly Zoom, with some Teams, Skype, Slack and even Jitsi thrown in the mix.

Yeah, Teams is the worst of them in every dimension.

We used to be on Zoom for video meetings, then it lost favor due to fears of industrial espionage (the encryption crisis, etc.) and via Office 365, Teams snuck up. Initially as a Zoom replacement only for video meetings, too, but lately folks seem to be discovering the other functionality and it's creeping in.

Atlassian (Confluence/JIRA) otherwise.

Not a fan of Zoom myself, just - it seems to be used quite a lot around me. For me Jitsi is king for video conferencing.

Sorry about Jira. :)

The condolences are appreciated ... :-)

Zoom's ugly as hell, but the Linux client has long been fairly reliable. Teams meanwhile is plagued by issues that don't seem to affect some other Electron-based apps or Chromium. During meetings it'll start out fine, then a minute in it'll suddenly use microphone. Opening any settings views tends to knock audio out of working state, too. Their official forums are full of threads on this, and support people suggesting crazy mitigations such as running it as root (admin user).

The most recent release seems to be from September 2021, which is positively ancient for something based on a browser engine and using it to display complex content from remote hosts.

Not least, it doesn't seem to allow include Yubikey access which is a bit of bummer when that becomes a company wide thing.

Then again Microsoft sites don't seem to work with security keys in Firefox either.

I actually preferred teams to slack+zoom last few times I had to use it at a client.

On MacOS it behaves pretty ok. Once you get used to the weird double text box.

Team is horrendous. Literally the worst group chat there is

You totally missed hipchat, Skype for business and mattermost then?

Hipchat yes, but Mattermost didn’t really leave that bad of an impression. A bland SaaS chat.

Teams however… the search functionality where you can find the message but can’t jump to it so that you can see the rest of the conversation.

I actually scrolled up for some 5 minutes non-stop once trying to get to the conversation like that

I don't know how long ago you used teams, but that feature has been active for a while now. Since that was your main complaint, maybe you will like it now.

that was the cherry on top / the straw that broke the camel's back. Overall sluggishness and long loading times were probably the main problem. Zulip seems to be the endgame team messenger for us. Once you embrace the thread-first paradigm the old-school Slack/etc. single-thread approach is just too noisy.

Working in quite the prominent big tech in Europe. 7k+ slack members. We abuse slack. inter-team daily work, intra teams coordination. Squads / topic q&a's, code reviews. Tribe based knowledge transfer, feedback, and many lulz. Of course an army of bots /webhooks about metrics, usage tresholds, alarms, even customer specific channels with automated bot support.

All the platforms have wonderful apps, even the web fallback is feature complete, and a breeze to use. The ecosystem of 3rd party integrations and apps is just incredibly big... All of this works consistently, probably more than 99.99 of uptime, and almost never we had any service disruption.

It definitely pays for itself.

It's extremely poor on Windows too: I've never seen an app pin all my cores and hit the power limits causing a tailspin to 400 MHz on a modern machine before.

Not unlike the Windows version it seems

teams is also an absolute CPU and memory hog on MacOS, even worse than slack, if that's possible.

I guess it depends how much utter nonsense is going on in your slack.

A quiet (?) teams seems to behave better than the absolute crapshow of slack 'apps' at my current gig.

All that being said, I do kinda like the outlook calendar app, means I never have to go to office.com anymore ;)

if you want to see something amazing watch the CPU usage when somebody posts a high-framerate animated GIF into a slack channel, it can suck down 70% CPU usage and a massive amount of battery on almost any laptop. The idea that a primarily text based chat client can consume 70% CPU on a quad-core, 10th gen core i7 is amazing.

The weird part there is that Zulip seems like a more sensible match for OSS especially since you can actually self-host it

Zulip was my backup plan if $BIGCORP decided not to renew our Slack subscription back in the day, for exactly this reason.

let's not miss the point.

the only reason companies use slack/teams/gmail is because those services understand the data belongs to their clients (the employer) and will provide ways to access private chats/change ownership of private documents/etc with zero trouble.

Yep, you're 100% right.

I was genuinely shocked to learn that slack admins can configure it so that certain folks can read private chats. Once that became known, most of my team offloaded to discord/keybase (at a previous gig with toxic leadership).