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Comment by oDot | Hacker News Reader

Zoom is still the best performing software. Alternatives fail in various ways. I wrote Emergency Remote[0], and for some companies thrown into the situation it is best to use it anyway. They can't handle more trouble during this time.

[0] https://www.emergencyremote.com/EmergencyRemote.pdf

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I fundamentally disagree. Webex has been around longer and despite the zoom founder trying to trash it, has been more reliable for me.

They just apparently spent their money on building an enterprise-worthy app instead of marketing.

https://help.webex.com/en-us/n80v1rcb/Cisco-Webex-Available-...

We use Webex at work and it's pretty reliable. Only issue I can think of off the top of my head is on Windows, Webex will sometimes freeze. Some colleagues have attributed that to certain bluetooth devices. I've personally not had that happen but have been in meetings where it did.

Edit: Ok, that took all of 10 seconds to get the first downvote. Seriously?

I would guess your colleagues are onto something. We've got a wide mix of Windows and Mac users and can't say I've heard of anyone reporting problems with freezing.

Ditto.

They say they have a Linux app... but Zoom is available in official repos, Flatpak, the Arch AUR, SUSE community, etc. That's huge for me. I don't really have any interest in blazing a new trail to use a web conferencing app.

There's nothing in the official repos because it's a java plugin on Linux. That being said, it works with OpenJDK:

https://at.projects.genivi.org/wiki/display/TOOL/WebEx+on+Li...

As far as I know that's the only option on Linux.

AUR is not an official repo, and zoom is not in Arch Linux repositories either.

I didn't mean to imply that is was.

One pattern I see with videoconferencing is that there never is a tool that works for all. WebEx was great for me but a lot of people complained. We had less complaints with Zoom and as of now Teams works best. I don’t expect this to last though.

The point of OP's post isn't which has better performance, it's about sticking to ethical principles in the face of challenges.

I'm in fascinating situation where I have access to two Webex accounts: 1. That of my primary employer 2. That of my consulting client (through primary employer)

I would've assumed they draw upon the same cloud resources; but based on our experience: 1. Client Webex has been basically unusable since day 1 of 100% remote work (~3 weeks ago) 2. Webex through my employer account works 98% of the time for 85% of the people.

I don't know where the bottleneck is with our client's webex - do they have lower tier account (unlikely), or are there some self hosted aspects or authentication aspects that are giving us trouble.

But my lesson learned is - different people will have drastically different experience with a tool for unpredictable / confounding variable reasons :/

Not for Linux users. The client repeatedly crashes.

I’ve never had any issues with the Linux client on 16.04

Why publish a document as a PDF on the web? Sharing content is what HTML on the web was designed for...

Also, what is your basis for saying Zoom has the best performance?

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