I must be an unique snowflake, because I switched jobs around March 2020, and the new place used Teams exclusively, and... it was good. Not stellar, but good for the standards of software in this decade. Better than Slack, anyway. There were some weird glitches happening couple times a year, but nothing major.

So either I'm incredibly lucky, or - my going hypothesis - Teams actually does work quite well, if you deploy it along with SharePoint, Exchange, and other Microsoft products it integrates with.

"Incredibly lucky" this time around I'm thinking. :)

Oh, are you using it on an Apple Silicon mac?

Not the OP but I do run Teams on Apple Silicon and it is still a bug-ridden mess. Crashes, rendering bugs, file attachment bugs. At least once a week, usually more. Searches fail to find results that I can manually locate by scrolling through the chat history. I have reinstalled the app more than once.

I have shared these observations in their feedback pop ups and I know Microsoft loves collecting telemetry. Why should they dedicate more money/resources to fix defects when it clearly hasn’t stopped them from growing their market share?

Teams is the first example I use to begrudgingly explain to someone that quality doesn’t matter.

As per the hypothesis I stated, I think your problem is running Teams on an Apple system. I'm not defending Microsoft releasing a shitty product here, but I think it's most likely they didn't bother to properly test/debug it for other OSes and configurations than "embracing Windows and the Office ecosystem".

Nah. Just a random Thinkpad.

I think Apple Silicon is going to one's experience worse here, not better - because of the "Apple" part.

No worries. Was just wondering, as other dev's I know that run Teams on macOS (intel and arm64) say it's a pretty shitty experience.

Was thinking maybe something had changed, but sounds like no. ;)

Same experience here, at most I might've run into file attachment issues a handful of times, but otherwise Teams has been flawless for video conferences. Zoom has given me way more trouble than Teams on Windows, Linux and Android devices.

Other than it using more CPU than it has any right to, Teams generally has worked well for me as well. The workplace has pretty fully embraced onedrive and SharePoint. Running on Windows.

sharepoint / onedrive integration with teams is one of those "just works" things. its really great for collaboration. teams has a lot of issues, especially regarding performance but its very feature-packed.

You should try the Teams preview. Much better in terms of resource usage. https://adoption.microsoft.com/en-us/new-microsoft-teams/

I do use it, and yes, its a lot better than the old. Thanks!

My experience aligns with yours. Calls almost never drop, it's easy to do ad-hoc calls/meetings of arbitrary groups of people, it's easy to attach a teams call for an outlook event, having persistent chats associated with recurring meetings is great. I really just don't have any complaints whatsoever.

I have experienced the same as well. I've been using team (on Linux for Christs sake) for past 3 years. Never had any major issues. Everything continues to be working as expexted. I'm using the web app on Chrome as a pinned tab since they are going to kill the Linux teams client.

I've never used this but apparently this wrapper is useful for linux people: https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux

Nope, this is no good. PWA works really well with Chrome though

looking at my teams interface right now. there are three separate "..." menus. Behind one of them is the settings, one is the installed apps, the third is to install more apps. Everyone involved in the decision making process that resulted in this UX should be banned from computers.

In my anecdotal experience, the less technical users have a much easier time with Teams than they do with Zoom.

I suspect it depends on what you're used to. Zoom fits in better with the Apple design system.

My experience is the same. It was OK but flaky in 2020 and I un-fairly blamed the React native and JS for the subpar experience. Improved considerably by mid-2023 though I still wish it took lesser system resources. Probably will never happen.

I don’t like Teams either but in my corporate environment it’s mostly without bugs at the moment. They dropped support for disabling incoming video for some unknown reason but that’s my only complaint right now.

At least internally, they moved that option fairly recently. Try checking all the submenus; IIRC it's available under View now.

So, I had this exact same experience, until IT turned on whatever group policy allows you to see the New Teams toggle switch. [1] You might still be on the “old teams”. In classic Microsoft fashion, it’s 1000x more complex than it has to be.

Guess what? It still sucks. I still hate using it. I still do less work because of it. Can you scroll back thru messages without seeing a 10am one loading spinner every 15 mess ages? No. But it’s faster… in the general sense!

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/new-teams-d...

I think Microsoft managed to get it to "functional garbage" in April 2020, as did Zoom. Both sucked, but the UI made enough sense that even your most antiquated & computer-illiterate colleagues, friends, & family could join a videocall from the isolation of their own home.

That was the real MVP for video conferencing software in the early pandemic, and Slack missed it by years.

The UX for teams is terrible compared with slack, but it pains me to say it, I find the video conference part better than zoom. I use the linux clients.

Scrolling the teams channels is also far from smooth. when you scroll up the message threads load slowly. You see they tried to improve it using virtualized lists but it did not work out.

Several coworkers and me also had the problem that we were unmuted but it said we were muted. Just today the teams screen blacked out when someone presented something.

Notifications are a mess too. And when you have multiple teams with the same channel names (project with microservices) it only shows the channel name, but not the team name in the notifications and in the UI.