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Microsoft Linux

Microsoft Teams is the First Office App For Linux (venturebeat.com) 68

Posted by msmash from the marching-ahead dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft today launched Microsoft Teams for Linux in public preview. No, that's not a typo -- Microsoft Teams is indeed the first Office app that the company has ported to Linux. You can download Microsoft Teams as a native Linux package in .deb and .rpm formats from here.
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Microsoft Teams is the First Office App For Linux More

Microsoft Teams is the First Office App For Linux

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  • I prefer running Teams in a Docker container in Ubuntu under WSL.

    I don't like being too close to people.

    • Doesn't matter. Teams on Linux is great. Now do Excel, Outlook, Visio, and Word.

      • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

        by Darinbob ( 1142669 )

        If Teams is great on Linux, then how come it royally sucks on Windows, OSX, and the Cloud?

        • I'm a Linux guy. MS Teams is cool. It's still being developed and there are oddities with some of the way certain personalized settings are implemented, but the functionality is good.

          The only problem that I see is that they're only developing 64bit code. Lots of us poor folks still only have our old 32bit machines to use :( But no worries, MS Teams is just as easily used as a web app, so I can still use Teams on Linux.

          • I dunno, my company has plans to ditch skype and go with only teams sometime next year, and it has a lot of people worried who've actually tried using Teams to hold meetings, since it actually makes the buggy-as-hell Skype seem well behaved in comparison. Teams has a good concept, but the execution is somewhat iffy.

            People locally are still annoyed that after being acquired we've had to migrate from online tools that work and work well (Atlassian) towards online tools that are mediocre at best and frequentl

          • Re: Personal space (Score:4, Insightful)

            by The123king ( 2395060 ) on Wednesday December 11, 2019 @04:28AM (#59507104)
            Firstly, teams has been "in development" for the last 3 and a bit years. There is no excuse for a multi-billion dollar company like MS to be distributing such a buggy and incompatible program if they've been developing it for so long.

            Secondly, Every Intel x86 CPU made since 2007, with early Atom CPU's being the exception, have 64-bit modes built in. The fact of the matter is, if you are unable to run a 64-bit OS because of CPU incompatibility, you need to buy a new computer.

            • Pretty much this.
              10 years ago I was building PCs for every day people, and a lot of stuff we installed was already 64-bit.

            • Every Intel x86 CPU made since 2007, with early Atom CPU's being the exception, have 64-bit modes built in.

              Thanks, I'll check mine. I think it's from 2010 or so, maybe it's newer. Would be nice if I can get it to install a 64bit OS.

              The fact of the matter is, if you are unable to run a 64-bit OS because of CPU incompatibility, you need to buy a new computer.

              I don't have extra money.

            • root@jupiter:~# lscpu
              Architecture: i686
              CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit

              Not sure why I never checked with this command before. Seems like I always used uname in some way. I always thought i686 meant that it was 32bit, and I never noticed the "CPU op-mode(s)" line before.

              Thanks for pointing this out, cheers!

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jabuzz ( 182671 )

            There must be very very few working Linux machines that don't have a 64bit CPU in 2020. The only way I could manage it would be to dig out one of my old laptops. I would need to go back to one that I stopped using back in 2007. I probably should wipe the hard drive and dispose of it.

          • PC's have been 64bit since 2004 for AMD and 2006 for Intel. Those early Athlon 64s and Core Duos are hopelessly too slow for the modern bloated internet. If you can't even find a desktop from 15 years ago then you have bigger problems than running Teams. You are effectively too slow for the internet.

        • Problem between chair and keyboard probably.

        • Not sure why you got modded flamebait. It is really beta-quality software. And after several years? Unacceptable.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kaenneth ( 82978 )

        Microsoft already has it done internally, they just don't want to release it.

      • Re: Personal space (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Bert64 ( 520050 ) <bert@NOSpaM.slashdot.firenzee.com> on Tuesday December 10, 2019 @09:48PM (#59506578) Homepage

        They won't, as those products are already successful they're used as leverage to force users to stay on windows...
        Teams and Edge are currently niche applications trying to take market share from incumbent competitors, so they port them in an attempt to get them established.

        They did the same with IE back in the days (there were versions for mac, solaris and hp-ux) however once IE achieved sufficient market share, the non windows versions were cancelled in an attempt to force users onto windows.

    • Personal space...
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • Not a native application, rather Chrome+JavaScript (Score:5, Informative)

    by ffkom ( 3519199 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2019 @05:32PM (#59505992)
    Even under Windows "Teams" is not really a "native application", but rather a bundle of a Chrome browser plus basically the JavaScript code you would get when running the "web client" in whatever browser.
    This is just an "electron"-style bundle (https://electronjs.org/ )

    Using an actual open-source browser with the web client is less easily infesting your system with Microsoft malware.
    • You know, eventually we will see more an more Electron-Web-style UI/UX applications because they do end up being the most consistent way to provide a desktop experience across multiple platforms. I'm not really a fan because of the inefficiency it introduces, but as long as it's not constraining resources, consistency is much preferred. And as much as it goes against my grain as a developer, the vast majority of users tend to have much better experiences with a GUI rather than a CLI. GUI invites you to expl

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by godrik ( 1287354 )

        While I appreciate the sentiment, the problem of these apps is that they are so freaking slow and resource hungry.

        I tried to use VSCode on linux and it is completely unusable because it draws so much resource.

        This ms teams app debfile is 64MB large (so that's compressed). What the hell? Why does a glorified IRC client need to be so big? Can't it be packaged any better? It is probably 63MB of framework and 1MB of actual app.

        Right now if I have both VSCode and teams running, they are likely to both bundle the

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Lennie ( 16154 )

          Well, a solution exists, don't install a new engine. Use the same one:

          https://www.howtogeek.com/3421... [howtogeek.com]

        • It's worth noting that the Ripcord [cancel.fm] client for Slack puts the official client to shame as far as memory is concerned. It only takes around 64Mb RSS when loaded.

          To further the point, Ripcord is written in Qt and C++ by one man and also supports the Discord messaging platform. The GUI I find much more functional and attractive with none of the toyish oversized elements in most Electron apps. It supports many features of either platform including conference voice calls. If one man can achieve so much, they'v

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by paugq ( 443696 )

            Same for Rocket.Chat and the Ruqola client (which is also Qt and C++ FWIW)
            https://github.com/KDE/ruqola [github.com]

            There was even an attempt to port it to Android, which surely made a better Android app than the official Android client.

      • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2019 @08:18PM (#59506378)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Terrible coding practices and inefficient architecture...like making simple things like VSCode giant Web applications in JavaScript has a cost beyond sluggishness. I wish folks considered wasted electricity...wasted heat...just so some dummy doesn't have to learn C/C++? I am convinced there are better ways to provide a good experience across 3 operating systems than JavaScript everywhere.

        The problem with our blind worship of innovation is that we celebrate innovation, no matter what the cost...someti

        • The problem with our blind worship of innovation is that we celebrate innovation, no matter what the cost

          I don't see how anyone can take pride in this work. Re-inventing the wheel with the 13,000th Instant Messenger program, and reimplementing it in a way that is much more wasteful, much less featured, much less versatile than many of its predecessors. It is neither new nor better.

          Do they ever look in the mirror and ask what have they really accomplished? Is it really making electronic communication better? That should be the goal, and maybe a measure of humility could help us see that we've already arrived

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Lennie ( 16154 )

        Why should you download an other browser engine when you already have one ?

        https://www.theverge.com/2019/... [theverge.com]

        https://www.howtogeek.com/3421... [howtogeek.com]

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sbryant ( 93075 )

        You know, eventually we will see more an more Electron-Web-style UI/UX applications because they do end up being the most consistent way to provide a desktop experience across multiple platforms.

        That depends on how you define consistent. The application will look the same as itself across platforms - that is true, and it is consistent with itself.

        Most of the rest of us believe that a consistent look and feel means that an application should be consistent with the other applications on the same platform. This is not the case for Electron or web-style applications. User settings are completely ignored - sizes and colours are all wrong, and each application now needs to be configured separately, and

      • Consistency and portability are massively overstated. I've said it before and said it again, for any given industry or demographic you have one platform, rarely are you developing one application for multiple. For business desktop its windows. The few businesses that use Macs or Linux are so small they don't matter. In the HPC world its Linux and only Linux. In professional video editing its only Macs, who cares about windows users in video editing? They don't have money, Hollywood uses Macs and they are th

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Shame, I was hoping for a decent cross platform UI toolkit. WPF is the best one but Windows only.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kaenneth ( 82978 )

        Hard to squeeze performance out of WPF; I resorted to drawing directly to an UNSAFE memory block and blitting it to the control surface to have real time animated graphics in WPF that were not baked in animation types.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          I don't do that kind of UI, I just stuck to basic, OS native stuff and find WPF is ideal. Nothing else comes close for ease of use and speed of development.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Dog-Cow ( 21281 )

            UIKit. Throw in CoreAnimation and CoreGraphics, and there's practically nothing a good UI should be able to do that isn't a handful of lines of code.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              Isn't that some kind of touch UI thing written in Javascript? The web site is so awful I can't even tell what it is. Can I interface it to C code and is it cross platform?

  • It's a trap!!!!!
    Someone had to say i. Why not me... Why not Zoidberg?
    • Why would I add this to a Linux desktop? Isn't there enough spyware in the world already?

    • Seriously. I don't get why this would be in any celebrated. This is Microsoft we're talking about here. Never forget who and what they are, and what they do:

      Embrace.
      Extend.
      Extinguish.

      This trash is just step 1.

      • What exactly is Microsoft going to be embracing, extending and extinguishing in this case? Teams is their own product. Are you saying that their aim is to extinguish their own product?

        If you are talking about the operating system itself, how does writing an application that runs on the OS destroy the platform? Are you suggesting that Teams is going to get so expanded that it eventually becomes an operating system itself? Because I can't see that succeeding considering that Emacs and systemd got there first.

  • Cancer like paying for software instead of for software development.
    Cancer like paying for features you only added to justify furter payment. Not because anyone needs or even wants them. (And paying to take them away again, like the Windows 8 start menu.)
    Cancer like walled garden monolithism. Where you have applications instead of combinable tools. (Call me when you can use the Photoshop tools, like the paintbrush, in Word, and vice versa.)
    Cancer like things not being files, making them hard to script.
    Cance

    • Braw, none of those things even come close to cancer. If you can't use the Internet without writing mindless hate speeches then maybe shouldn't be on here. Buy a book or something.

  • Microsoft Teams is the First Office App For Linux

    What the shit does that even mean? The first office suite for Linux was probably Wordperfect Office. Was that supposed to read "Microsoft Teams is their First Office App For Linux"?

    #slashdot #fail

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Ksevio ( 865461 )

      They mean it's the first app from Microsoft's "Office" suite that's been ported to Linux, not general software that might be used in an office

  • Would anyone care explaining what Teams actually is? Who uses it, and what for? Or just post a link to a short summary. (I sincerely don't have a clue, and never heard of it)

  • RPM package? For what distribution? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by whoever57 ( 658626 ) on Tuesday December 10, 2019 @06:43PM (#59506174) Journal

    It requires a version of libstdc++ that is not available on CentOS 7.

    I can understand not supporting CentOS 6, but 7? Come on, Microsoft, put a little effort into it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HiThere ( 15173 )

      Do you really want them to?
      I'm wondering which libraries it requires, and whether there's a decent distribution that doesn't install some of them. But I don't think I count RedHat as a decent distribution. The last time I tried to use it, it encrypted the it's partitions without asking. They could only be read if I booted into the RedHat installation. So I quickly reformatted those partitions into something useful.

  • Its the embrace part of embrace, enhance, extinguish. The ultimate aim of this is to make money for windows. And, another observation, is the needed server , running on Linux?

  • You could get Microsoft Word for Unix and it would run on things like an AT&T 3B2 using dumb terminals.

    It was horrible. A group I worked for tried to do a document in it and they ended up having to use a file per chapter (or less) and could never get the auto indexing stuff or even page numbers to work properly. We ended up using TeX for the inch thick book.

  • Its the beginning of the Microsoft's hug with Linux. Microsoft loves Linux, you know. Kind of the same way Lennie Small loves to stroke hair (Of Mice and Men).

  • Uhhh (Score:2)

    by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
    Microsoft does not own the word "Office". It's "Microsoft Office". Libre Office, for example, has been on linux for a while now.
  • I've been using this for over a year: https://github.com/IsmaelMarti... [github.com]

    Tried the new MS version, and I got to say, I like Teams-for-linux better right now.

  • Pigs are flying...

    https://packages.microsoft.com... [microsoft.com] is a thing. Not a thing I would deign to touch, because of their binary blobs of course, but still, for the mofos who don't care, you can go install M$ things on GNU/Linux. Hm, I bet a lot of their software depends on systemd.

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