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Comment by latortuga | Hacker News Reader

Still no linux support for video and now no linux support for screen sharing. Here's to hoping Google ramps up whatever Slack competitor they're trying to roll hangouts into.

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Yes! When it comes to screen share and video on Linux, we've had the best luck with hangouts. We are paying Slack customers, but no still no video? Slackers.

The worst part is this even affects non-linux users. My team is about 80% macOS and 20% linux. We can't have meeting without 20% of the team, so Slack is useless.

You need to support everyone, or it all becomes pointless.

Lack of Linux support is the only thing preventing our organization from ditching hangouts.

What's wrong with Google Hangouts? (I don't have any perspective, just asking)

In my experience multi-person chat is awkward.

No keyboard & mouse sharing. And to a lesser extent, not everyone wants a Google account.

My employer also blocks some Google services. For example, I can't access Gmail. Trying to use Hangouts without Gmail is swimming upstream a bit.

Have you tried hangouts.google.com? It's possibly still blocked, depending on your employer, but if not, it's just a hangouts webUI that also allows calls.

Hangouts actually works at the moment, but work could change that at anytime, so making it a key piece of my workflow is unwise. I get your point though.

Gotta love life behind the firewall!

> Trying to use Hangouts without Gmail

How are these two related (usage-wise, I mean)?

Also, is your employer paying a Google Apps subscription, but blocking email? WTF.

Employer blocks Gmail (and other sites) via the corporate firewall. They are not paying for Google Apps (at least not for me). Get a job at any large enterprise and you'll experience some restrictions you wouldn't find at a smaller company.

Oh, I assumed your employer was using Google Apps. If that's not the case, why do you need Hangouts? Don't they use something else for voice+video?

Hangout's encoding also it's a real performance hog because most devices don't support H.264 in hardware. Every time I'm in a hangout the fans come on and the battery rapidly drops towards zero.

Most devices DO support H.264 encoding. Hangouts however uses VP9 in Chrome and that's not HW accelerated. If you use Safari on Mac it'll switch to H264 and that will stress CPU less.

It has exactly the same problem in Safari on mac in my experience. Battery is dead in about 10 minutes.

Yes, you are of course right. Confused the two.

I'd love to see someone do the math how much CO2 is Google unnecessarily produce by enforcing VP9 because they are fussy about licensing fees.

I've tried to run 4K60 VP9 (and h.265 for that matter) video from youtube on the latest top spec MacBook Pro and it's completely impossible to watch. Transcoded to h.264 and computer barely gets warm.

Maybe you could rephrase that. How many years of human progress and CO2 emissions have been caused by the uncooperative licensing situation caused by these software patent owners?

Well by that logic we can ask anyone for free stuff and point at CO2. Google is not giving away their data for free, the lend it to you.

> I'd love to see someone do the math how much CO2 is Google unnecessarily produce by enforcing VP9 because they are fussy about licensing fees.

It would definitely be an interesting way to look at how bad software patents are for our society. It's not Google's fault (though they do participate in this system) that good technology had been locked away only to be used by proprietary software.

Well Google want something for free, why can't I get stuff from Google for free? Like, not rent their data, but actually browse their index properly (remember, verbatim && date search has been removed and it's likely to get even worse).

Not sure what that has to do with a discussion about why Google uses a non-patented codec rather than a patented one. What access Google gives their users is not a factor, and is a non-sequitur.

But also I think you're missing the point of free software if you want to limit usage of free software based on your personal value judgement of a company. That's antithetical to free software.

Hangouts Meet fixes this. I believe they try to pick a codex per system that is supported in hardware (rather than using VP9 whenever it could).

(I work for G, opinions are my own)

I believe GP was saying that they'd go Slack-only in their org if it had linux support for screensharing/video. Slack is pretty much everywhere now and has the mindshare and platform support for chat and collaboration. Having everything in one place makes things easier, ergo ditch hangouts and have it all in one place. Hangouts is missing crucial features to even begin to fully compete with Slack, including decent chat, collaboration, integrations, reasonably good mobile apps, and trendiness.

It isn't what is wrong with Hangouts so much as it is a list of things we like about Slack: 1) Channels - each message has a home. Notifications can be set to the correct level. 2) APIs/Integrations - We hook it up to github, pivotal, new relic, AWS and some of our own custom hooks. Reminders, alerts, messages - whatever we dream up that needs to be done and it is open enough to do it. 3) History 4) Past an image right in it without saving it as a file. 5) Voice calls.

Right now Hangouts is only for meetings where we want to share a screen or video chat. Most of the time a voice call is enough.

Have you looked into Discord? Not sure about their Linux availability, but it can do all of the above, also voice channels. They don't have video/screen share right now but it's apparently something they're working on. It's also more free than Slack.

That might not be a good thing though, since it's unclear if $5 monthly will be able to support them over time.

Hangouts Chat / Meet [0] brings a lot, if not all, of this when it comes out. Meet keeps most of what hangouts video has today, but a better UI and uses hardware codecs when it chan.

Hangout Chat is really a rework of the idea of hangouts. It brings a lot of functionality that people like from Slack (everything you mention I believe).

Note that Hangouts today does have search sorta (it ain't great). If conversation history is on, it can be searched from Gmail web (not Inbox either), using the "in:chat" filter.

(I work for G, opinions are my own)

[0] https://thenextweb.com/google/2017/03/09/google-takes-slack-...

Are there any plans to have a decent API? Getting a script to post to Slack is trivial. Same with having a bot read all the messages in realtime.

From: https://blog.google/products/g-suite/meet-the-new-enterprise...

"The Hangouts Chat platform supports a wide range of capabilities — from bots to simple scripting using Google App Script — and integrates with third-party applications so teams can do more right from within the conversation."

That's I think all that has been said so far. More details will come once it's released.

Hangouts eats battery like mad. The UI/UX is still a big mess: there's really two hangouts webapps; one for calendar calls and one for ad-hoc calls, and that's a mess. Finally, it's nice to have one single tool, rather than multiple tools for this sort of thing.

We've been using Zoom for the past 2 years and their Linux support is outstanding. Not the prettiest of UIs, but very reliable.

Can second that. Zoom works on Windows/Linux/Mac.

Does Screen Hero work natively in browsers or require some sort of plugin?

I think plugins is a major buzz-kill for most people (like me).

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