Ask HN: Is there something like Join.me for Linux? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is there something like Join.me for Linux?

37 pointsxstartup22 comments

For over a year Linux support has been the second-most-popular request on the official join.me Ideas Forum and there are over 1800 votes for the idea:

http://help.join.me/forums/182750-join-me-ideas-forum/suggestions/3466551-make-a-version-compatible-with-linux-ubuntu-12-04

View on HN

We've (IPFS community) have weekly open calls for the entire community and had great success with Zoom. I'm personally on Ubuntu, Arch and macOS, and everything is working fine and they continuously improve the software. Seems to have a free plan as well: https://zoom.us/pricing

Edit: adding that the few times I had to resort to using my phone, Zoom on Android has been working fine, even thought the UX is a bit confusing on mobile devices (Android version at least)

Zoom.us works perfectly with Arch +1 on that.

Zoom is rock solid on Linux. If they had rooms that were super easy to join spontaneously like appear.in, there'd be no reason to use anything else.

My biggest gripe with Zoom is that they have tech in place to seamlessly support open-standard connections (SIP & XMPP), but make their utmost to sweep both under the rug: SIP is $49/month/user and XMPP server isn't advertised as such and wouldn't let anything but official proprietary client connect, either.

https://jitsi.org/

This is open source and free and so on

I want to broadcast my desktop, so that anyone can watch it online and that's what Join.me does. How is it something which Jitsi offers?

I mean, it offers the same thing.

https://appear.in

Blank screen on mobile Safari

This works great on Linux, as long as everyone has a solid internet connection. The mobile app has improved a little, but is still quite lacking.

What happens if one participant doesn't?

That participant's video / audio quality degrades rapidly. As far as I understand it, appear uses point-to-point webrtc connections for each participant. Another issue I've run into is that sometimes, I can hear/see a participant better than others on the call (I guess because of the way it handles connections). Overall though, the room url and the lack of login needed is super convenient, despite the occasional call quality issues.

https://meet.jit.si/

I used https://appear.in/ for a job interview once and it was pretty slick.

https://www.uberconference.com/pricing

I second uberconference. The audio conferencing quality is great, users have the ability to share their screen, and there's a call in number for people to talk over the phone. It's not videoconferencing, but for most meetings I think video is unneeded. It's free for up to 10 users, which is more than sufficient for most meetings, and $10 a month after that is pretty reasonable.

Zoom seems to have compatibility and works well.

Zoom.us seems to work well using the browser extension alone. I've even gotten it to work in my Chromebook without any issues.

I'm curious as well - I have a really hard time getting videos to work on linux.

I use Chrome Remote Desktop for Windows, but it is also available on Linux.

I dislike that zoom.us requires a proprietary plugin.

Appear.in

Reply on news.ycombinator.com