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Comment by Retardo_88 | Hacker News Reader

What do you not like about Zoom, and which video conference product would you recommend instead?

My experience with zoom has been on linux.

I hate the fact that it requires you to install the client for it to work.

The client randomly spikes in cpu usage while running in the background. Multiple times I've also had this issue where I'll try to right click the zoom icon in the system tray and quit zoom, causing it to hang and reach 100% cpu usage on one core.

I also don't like that on clicking on a zoom video call link sometimes the browser to client redirect works but sometimes it doesn't and you need to then go back and click the link again.

For me, Google meet works much better.

I haven't personally tried this on Linux, but on macOS at least, the feature to take calls in the browser is hidden behind a bunch of dark patterns.

Take a look at step 2 here: https://it.umn.edu/services-technologies/how-tos/zoom-join-t...

Zoom can be browser only, it just uses dark patterns to lure you to install the client. The link to join by web appears when all others fail...

But why would you use it when it has like 1 second latency. Google Meet is kind of meh but works. Or pure audio calls like Telegram or something like Mumble (which has rooms, you can host a server yourself, is open source and doesn't suck).

I can see why salespeople prefer video calls but for technical topics it just doesn't make sense.

Same here (ububtu, dwm). I can use every other web-based video conference platform with no problem (jit.si, google meet, and others) but zoom eats all memory and crashes the browser. The app refuses to run, complaining that I don’t have ibus installed (I removed ibus, because it’s one of a hundred unnecessary layers of crap added by distro maintainers).

I was planning on mentioning Zoom as well. The Linux client especially is insanely bad, iirc it also drew itself on top of everything.

My suggestion on Linux at least is to use the web client. Just get the url, do a 's#/j/#/wc/join/#' to it and open it in browser of your choice. You'll need to copy the password manually, sometimes it might require captcha etc, but at least it's somewhat usable.

This works on MacOS as well (in Firefox or Chrome). No way in hell I’m installing Zoom on a Mac.

Some of the major problems: 10% of my CPU and ~1GB memory by simply launching the application on linux. Absolutely ridiculous. Can't remove passwords from my personal meetings, controls are sluggish as hell, like I'll click to either turn on or off my camera and have to wait for 3-4 seconds for it to actually do anything. Multiple smaller problems piled on the side as well.

People love to shit on Skype but even the web version of Skype behaves better than zoom for me. Google meet, Skype, meet.jit.si - I take any of those over zoom.

If I had it my way, I’d just use calendar invites and FaceTime. The quality is 10x everything else.

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