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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

Offer a comparable alternative, then. I spend half my day on meetings either internally or with clients, and every time I have to jump on a client meeting with Microsoft Teams/Google Hangouts/WebEx/GotoMeeting because their company bans Zoom, it's a recipe for a fruitless meeting. Someone will fumble the sharing controls; screens will take forever to present; at least one person's microphone will become inaudible, static-y, or suffer from "robot voice slow-down" lag.

To say nothing of the clusterf*ck that happens when two company-specific instances of Microsoft Teams try to communicate with each other and I'm left with a bunch of orphaned chatrooms with outside personnel after the meeting concludes.

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> Offer a comparable alternative, then

Here's a few:

  - https://meet.jit.si/ which you can also self host https://github.com/jitsi
  - https://bigbluebutton.org/ which you can also self host https://github.com/bigbluebutton

I've found that they're especially useful, when integrated with Rocket.Chat https://rocket.chat/ which you can also self host https://github.com/RocketChat

That way you have an experience that's a lot like Slack/Teams, with pretty good support for chat, reactions, file uploads, discussions, making quotes etc., while also being able to start video/audio calls with the press of a single button.

Of course, if that's too many platforms, Rocket.Chat also supports WebRTC, albeit the UX was a bit less stellar when i last tried it.

Alternatively, there is also Nextcloud Talk, which can integrate with your instance of Nextcloud and allow for file sharing, chatting etc., though personally i found Rocket.Chat to be more usable: https://nextcloud.com/talk/

Regardless, those are some very competent options which allow all the data to remain on your own servers.

Yes, there are many self-hosted options out there. https://github.com/meetecho/janus-gateway works well for multi-party video with up to about 15 users in a room assuming everyone has a reasonably reliable connection.

Janus caught my attention when I was looking at WebRTC servers (SFUs) last year, but I couldn't find any good FOSS web apps for it. Do any exist?

It is a complete video conferencing package by itself, so you generally don't need anything else. It just works out of the box to give you multi-party video conferencing across multiple rooms.

We use it in our (closed source) online tutoring / whiteboard software, and it is pretty easy to integrate, by taking their videoroom sample code.

What is it you're looking for?

I didn't see a video conference web app. I did find the Video Room on the demos page, but it doesn't look suitable for real-world use. I didn't notice anything better in a quick scan of the janus-gateway github page, nor in debian's list of janus* packages.

Perhaps I'm overlooking something?

Element, too!

Element actually uses jitsi.

Oh right, they're just planning to get voice and video working over matrix natively in the semi near future

it’s working already actually (in alpha) :)

AdmiralAsshat's point was that all of the alternatives sucked because they were difficult or flakey to use: they weren't "comparable". Notably, the alternatives being mentioned as non-comparable weren't even trying to be local: they were remote service/ (which if you think Zoom is particularly bad, is still an improvement) built by giant companies that have tons of resources to have an army working on just these tools... and they all still sucked.

You then responded to this comment by just matter-of-factly asserting that you had the list of missing alternatives... but, really, you are simply hijacking the thread to point out that alternatives exist "which allows all the data to remain on your own servers"; but, you provide no evidence or argument to address whether these products are actually "comparable" (to the point where it just feels like you didn't even understand the point being made) in a way that, say, Google Hangouts--which is the product Google created WebRTC for!--isn't.

I use https://meet.jit.si/ daily and can confirm it is easier to use than Zoom or Hangouts.

No nag screens trying to get me to install desktop clients or trying to get me to create an account or give up personal information.

It just works.

Like all apps that are "just" WebRTC, jitsi doesn't work well on networks with persistently high packet loss. A VC app needs to work reliably 99.99% of the time, not just 99% of the time.

Agreed. I suggested Jitsi to a few university professors early in the pandemic last year. They used it for a good 6 months, with classes of about 20 people, 2-3 times a week.

The experience of not having to login and fuss with accounts was great. However, when everyone had their cameras on + screen sharing, audio quality typically suffered.

These professors since moved on to use Zoom and it’s way more stable. I don’t like Zoom generally (for many of the reasons noted in this thread), but it’s definitely reliable.

Galène[1], which is FLOSS, was specifically developed by the University of Paris for the purpose you're describing.

The UI is terrible, I'll admit that, but the performance and scalability is better than Zoom.

[1] https://galene.org/

This is basically trading one reliability issue for another. The one chosen by the professor is reliable in excluding some students, the ones who actually care about their privacy, from the conferences.

Jitsi works nowhere near as well as Zoom or any other VC for me. More than once we've had to go back to zoom when it drops our connection every other minute.

I disagree that alternatives are flakey or difficult to use. If anything it's the opposite. I use BBB daily (and sometimes Jitsi) with a very varied group (including people who never had a computer before) and the results are much better than with Zoom. Maybe Zoom is intuitive if you grew up with computers and with bad software, but honestly the quasi-requirement of installation (it's non-trivial to use the web version) and the dark patterns galore are hard to navigate for non-techy people.

I think the OP meant options that are as "easy" as click on a link and join a meeting. I use BBB and Mumble but there are others I know who would never know how to set up their own instance or even what github is.

This is why multiple companies exist to sell you one-click hosted instances of these without lock-in.

Yeah, the press release https://datenschutz-hamburg.de/pressemitteilungen/2021/08/20... mentions that (in addition to a nameless internal videoconferencing tool) Hamburg uses Dataport as a vendor, which seems to imply Jitsi Meet: https://video.openws.de/

jitsi is exactly that, been using it for the whole pandemic for meetings for my team of 10 ppl, never had an issue.

Jitsi won't consistently work at scale and is (like most webrtc only applications) a terror to debug. You can basically forget about using it with someone that has issues.

I like your line reasoning… but the problem with video conferencing isn’t really technical- IMO it’s all about the User experience (UX). Zoom by far beats the competition in this regard. It’s UI could be better but compared the mess of competitors it’s far more straightforward … just my opinion…

I don't think Zoom "beats" anyone in UX, especially with the dark patterns. They're just popular. I've seen countless times hundreds of people unable to activate the "Computer Audio" option on company-wide meetings because it's in a secondary tab with zero-affordance. Recently they made it very hard to find the "gallery mode" icon (you have to hover a dark area). They also make it borderline impossible to open it on the browser, forcing multiple reloads or whatnot (the method it changes all the time). Honestly Jitsi, BBB and even Teams are all better IMO.

One of my pet-peeves with the zoom UX is that it always switches to full-screen mode if someone is sharing the screen. This is particularly annoying if you are also using the participant or chat windows (because there's voting or chat messages etc.) and if you are switching between different presenters (meaning it switches again and again to full screen). Why can't it respect my decision to not have a full-screen window?!

BBB was a mess. It's security and privacy may be great on paper (open source, self hosted). But that's the lawyer's side.

In practice: BBB had server-side mute, so your muted microphone would still send audio to the server. Servers could be compromised through uploaded documents (processed by LibreOffice).

The biggest problems might have been fixed by now. But self hosting half baked software isn't an alternative to most.

As someone who runs Zoom via the browser (they do deploy a dark pattern to discourage this behavior but there is no good reason to trust them) I find that Hangouts and Teams are both solid alternatives in terms of AV quality. Would be happy to see some actual data on this claim.

People prefer the interface they are used to. I personally find Zoom to be really frustrating from an interface angle but that is probably just familiarity. Of course Zoom could have avoided such issues had they been more conscious of ethics.

That dark pattern drives me crazy. I use Zoom on Linux and prefer to use it in browser and I still almost always miss the link after having done it several times.

That must be a very dark pattern. I didn't even know it was possible to run Zoom in a browser, and even now that I know I can't figure out how to do it. What's the secret?

You need to click download zoom on the meeting launch and give it a second, it will show a “having trouble?” message and let you open in a browser.

Wow, that is evil. Thanks!

I haven't tried it lately, but last time I tried it around a year ago, if you try to use the web client and the moderator hasn't shown up yet, you have to solve a Google ReCaptcha every couple of minutes while you're waiting, or it kicks you out.

I usually try to go with the charitable interpretation, but when the dark patterns start to stack up that high...

It can be enabled/disabled by your company's Zoom administrator.

The web UI is severely limited compared to the desktop client which is why I suspect they do this (even though I disagree with it).

I've had some very confusing meetings because I worked at a company that required us to use web, but the presenter wasn't and what she was seeing didn't match us which led to some confusing scenarios. Things like the grid view weren't there last I used it and some of the more advanced presenter features just don't do anything for web iirc

Oooh, so that's why I've never ever seen the buttons for breakout rooms or to participate in votes? And there's nothing out there that says that's the reason. Any searches I did to find out why these things don't work for me were met with 'here's how to do it'

Just replace the /j/ in the URL of the page with /wc/join/, and you should be in the zoom web client.

You can even prepare your links this way so you're there to begin with.

If you use Firefox I recommend https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/zoom-redirect...

I don't really get the religion around the video platforms. I use three (Zoom, Google Meet, and Bluejeans) on a regular basis and they all seem simultaneously decent enough and imperfect on my network on a given day. Teams is fine too but I rarely use it.

From my experience in Latin America, Zoom tolerates network problems better. I've connected from or have had attendants using DSL, Cable, 3G, 4G (Not LTE) and call in phone audio.

yep I think alternatives have improved but pre covid i traveled all over the world for work and the big thing was Zoom worked the best on iffy connections and also played best with multiple companies IT systems

I really liked Bluejeans (I find its audio/video quality to be far superior to the alternates) but it really didn't do well over jittery/slow connections. Zoom swept in and through people's refusal to use anything but what they're familiar with it chased out Bluejeans and we got rid of it.

So much fiery passion about these random tools, haha

Browser zoom drops my audio after several minutes making me disable and reenable audio to get a few more minutes of audio. Annoying when it happens mid sentence, but that's a price you have to pay for using Zoom.

Perhaps I am jaded, but as of yet I have never used a browser-based video chat that worked well. Invariably connection issues arise which I have only rarely experienced with Zoom. My best explanation is that a native app has more to work with in terms of codecs and connection management than a browser can offer.

So to this end, that "dark" pattern is ultimately to a user's benefit and they are truly better off if they use the native app. If Zoom did not do this, they would pay the cost in terms of support and perceptions that the service is not reliable, in much the same way that Hangouts is unusable.

Having said that, you should be able to acknowledge that you do want to use the browser and don't want to see the pattern again.

This dark pattern may benefit some users, however there is a trade-off between video quality and data security. Different users have different preferences/needs between these two aspects of a video call service. Tricking people into selecting one option is rarely done out of concern for the interests of the end user. I would personally be much more convinced that I am benefiting from installing an app that has a history of data security issues if they gave a clear and up front explanation of why this benefits me.

FWIW, my work uses Google Meet running through Chrome and it gets the job done for remote collaboration. I would actually be curious to see some figures on the difference in performance between Browser and Desktop. I imagine that you can do a few tricks for compression and buffering on with a native app that would not be possible on a browser, but I haven't seen a big difference in terms of my ability to have a meeting.

Hangouts is all but dead, and Chat/Meet suck by comparison... at one point, I loved Hangouts, one comms app to rule them all, SMS, chat, video conf, messaging, even google voice... then it all fell apart.

Half the time, I can't join a meet with video, or the video works in the "test" window, but as soon as you join it's broken.

I'm mostly okay with Teems though.

> As someone who runs Zoom via the browser (they do deploy a dark pattern to discourage this behavior but there is no good reason to trust them) I find that Hangouts and Teams are both solid alternatives in terms of AV quality. Would be happy to see some actual data on this claim

Some anecdata, recently i had to switch from Teams to Zoom, with the same person, and the audio quality was drastically better on Zoom for both of us.

As someone how uses both Zoom and Google Hangouts, there is nothing Zoom offers that Google hangouts does not provide. The quality is the same for both, but at least Hangouts does not install a sketchy client on my machine that constantly runs in the background.

you can disable said client on startup...

Google hangouts is garbage. I have never had a hangout call that didn’t freeze or have someone dropout. The audio on hangouts is beyond bad and makes people sound completely different than they do in person. The video quality is always grainy on my fiber connection. Zoom doesn’t have these problems for me.

Same issue here. If the link is too slow screen shares become grainy and text is hard to read.

While Zoom usually only slows the frame rate, but not the resolution.

I find it interesting that people have such different experiences with the same tool. I tend to have 2 or 3 hangouts meetings a day and I can't remember the last time there was an issue.

Likewise - we switched from Gotomeeting to Google Meet (which is the same as hangouts, right?) mostly because the experience for staff in Latin America was so much better.

That said, Gotomeeting is the worst of the bunch. They haven't added a useful feature in years, the CPU usage is terrible, their parasitic launcher is very difficult to get rid of, ugh... I'm surprised they're still around.

How are you okay with the audio compression? It makes everyone sound flat, monotone. It’s hard to tell who’s who if people have their cameras off.

Appart from not having a linux client.

The client is a web browser. There are web browsers on Linux. I use hangouts in both Chrome and Firefox, and haven't had a problem with either of them.

While hangouts is a dumpster fire, Google Meet seems to work pretty well for those who aren't willing to jump through some self-hosted hurdles to run their own.

Hangouts has zoom-level annotation or 5k screen share where texts are crisp?

How often do you use those features, and how useful are they to all participants?

Everyday. Multiple times. How do you screen share and not use annotation?

I’ve yet to see someone use it, so clearly one of us is in a bubble.

I'm sorry, but Hangouts is terrible. It sucks on every level. The UI is so bad it's hard to believe. I wish I could sit down with their product team to get an explanation for how badly Hangouts is designed. Takes about 10s to see all the problems with it compared to Zoom.

My 94 year old grandpa would constantly struggle with zoom, to the point that we'd schedule him 15 minutes early to avoid half the meeting being about zoom problems. Hangouts worked well for him first try. The auto captioning also works quite a bit better with hangouts, which is good for people with hearing loss.

Can you be more specific about the UI problems? It seems pretty equivalent to Zoom to me.

Two words: Gallery view.

Like what in the actual fuck. How are they unable to do a simple grid properly? It’s just rectangles. The UI is there to copy from Zoom even.

I don't think having the gallery view grid less gracefully handling non-even numbers of participants justifies saying "The UI is so bad it's hard to believe".

I used to agree with you, until I discovered that (surprise, surprise) Hangouts works great on Chrome, not so much on other browsers.

Screen sharing on hangout (a year or so ago) has been terrible for me, especially for text dense screens like code. Pair programming on hangouts I can't even read the other person's code a lot of the time. Also hangout quality for video and audio drops really fast on relatively poor quality network. I've had a few cases where the quality on hangout was too poor so we switch over to zoom.

Jitsi Meet (https://meet.jit.si/)

Yup. We use this for every meeting at my local hackerspace and it's been great.

Bonus: it tells you when connectivity issues are on your end or someone else's end, everyone's network stats are visible.

Easy to self-host and probably less expensive to host than all the MS Office licenses used for MS Teams or paid Zoom licenses. I set up Jitsi Meet months ago and all I ever had to do was to add user accounts using prosody on the server (which should be improved imo). I've not needed to touch anything since first setup, except for user accounts. It just works. What's more is, that some solutions like MS Teams still is not able to properly work on all browsers. While Discord has solved this problem for ages and Jitsi Meet simply works in all modern browsers. I have a hunch, that with MS Teams there is active unwillingness to make it work properly. How else can this be explained?

> I have a hunch, that with MS Teams there is active unwillingness to make it work properly. How else can this be explained?

As the saying goes, never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity.

There's an update to that saying:

Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity, unless it's Microsoft. Then it's definitely malice.

Used it once, host shared the screen, never seen anything what they have shared.

Webex is so shockingly bad. Zoom, Teams, Slack, all seem to work fairly well, all have clients (and can run in the browser)

Webex - which I have to use as part of a university course I'm doing on the side - requires you to run it in a browser on my OS, it has really awful options (like allowing the presenter to unmute people), half the claimed features just aren't available (virtual whiteboard, no major loss as everyone uses a shared google doc instead), and if you disconnect for some reason (like sound stops working which happens fairly frequently) you are kicked out of a group and you can't get back in.

Must be your specific webex/connection settings/version then, we have it in our massive banking corps (90k+employees worldwide) and none of the things you describe are an issue. We have adopted it some 7 years ago.

You don't need to run it in browser at all, there are desktop (and phone) clients for every major OS out there. This shows that you are really not familiar with it.

Now it is still a crappy system, but for different reasons than you describe. And other solutions have their own problems, as indicated by article and elsewhere.

> there are desktop (and phone) clients for every major OS out there. This shows that you are really not familiar with

Now you sound as if you are not familiar with it. Looks like Webex added Linux(Deb & RHEL) on May 28, 2021. Before that, you had to use their legacy java applcation which also necessitated you to *manually* figure out, then hunt down & install the missing dependencies. And it was still shit.

The 1000 slightly different versions of Webex that are all bundeled under the same brand are its biggest drawback.

My university uses it as well, and the normal latest version of Webex is on par with Zoom. However for some courses the lecutrers use e.g. Webex Training which is barely usable garbage (but is the only version that has built-in quiz features).

My company uses webex since years and quizz is now built into the Webex Meetings app as they bought slido. I agree though that Webex Training, Webex Support, and some very old webex versions are just terrible.

> You don't need to run it in browser at all, there are desktop (and phone) clients for every major OS out there. This shows that you are really not familiar with it.

I don't care about anyone else's OS. I have desktop zoom, desktop slack, and desktop MS Teams, all work fine. Webex has web only (which means no whiteboard -- which I'm told from people who do have supported desktops -- mac users I think -- isn't good), no joining of private rooms, and the awful spyyware ability of remote people to turn on your microphone without your permission.

why is running in a browser so bad? Lots of people actually WANT this feature, as they do not want to install native apps.

Because it isn't fully featured - it lacks the majority of features of the native client

>Offer a comparable alternative, then.

Maybe I am not doing a lot of meetings compared to others but I really haven't had more or less problems with Teams, Google products, or GoToMeeting (haven't used webex in a long time) ... compared to Zoom.

It's all a wash for me among those experience wise.

I constantly have various orgs tell me all about how they only use X video conferencing app because of Y experience. Most of those stories conflict ;)

I'm in meetings typically 2+ hours a day. I'm on a decent but not great Internet connection. My experience is they all mostly work but none are guaranteed to have a video/audio glitch free call.

Same. I think a lot of people's experience with them is just happenstance.

I have to do many online meetings, with attendants from developing countries (like mine) or unstable links. From our experience it seemsthat Zoom tolerates our unstable internet links better. I guess it has better error correction.

There's also the annotate feature is super useful, which is missing in Teams and Webex. And also offers dial-in phone numbers in more countries then the rest.

Zoom's audio design is nicer too, compared to Webex has some very annoying beeps that are a pain in large meetings.

Regarding Teams, I have a computer with plenty of RAM, SSD disks and a high end work provided smartphone. Teams is super slow in both of them. I haven't been able to use the Exe version for weeks now because it's too slow. There is also no way to quote a chat using the Windows and Web version, so in order to quote chats I have to do it from my phone.

Every once in a while I have buggy Teams or Webex meeting, that ends with a "Hey you know, I'll just send you a Zoom link".

It's not their job to name alternatives, it's their job if a tool complies to the laws.

Technically yes, but practically, if someone can't get their job done without breaking rules, they're going to break the rules. If your goal is actual compliance with rules, giving people a way to comply is much more effective.

Tell that the software companies. You can't demand to change the maw just because software companies want to illegaly collect data from their users. Why are people always complaining about data protection officers but not the shitty software companies. They have the tracking and the bugs which endanger their users and most of the time they won't even get punished.

100% agree. Data privacy _is_ doable. Yes, it's added complexity, but software companies make it out to be much worse than what it actually is — and people believe them. These large software companies just don't want the inherent risk associated with saying "I comply with data privacy law XYZ" – because if they actually don't because they missed something, they will be sued for a lot of money. It's just about money, nothing new.

Although I mainly use zoom for work, I've also used Google Meet occasionally and have found the quality to be on par with Zoom.

I notice you mentioned Google Hangouts instead of Google Meet, I'm not sure if they are the same now (too hard to keep track of these) but a brief google search seems to suggest they are not the same. If so, my past experience with Google Hangouts with friends would suggest it is indeed terrible. If so, you could give Google Meet a try.

I think Teams has every bug known to computers. Though, I've found GotoMeeting to work extremely well, and WebEx has been very decent but much better than Teams.

Teams manages to reboot Macintosh M1 machines after a few minutes in a call.

Given my experience as a sad participant in Teams meetings, I'll go on a limb and say Teams is probably running an electron shell implemented in x86 code calling a 64bit shim layer inside an ARM hosted VM.

I'm not surprised. It can runs super slow on my computer with plenty of RAM and lots of CPU.

I believe that the government in Hamburg and the Bundeswehr are implementing(or has already) element and matrix.

https://element.io/pro/federation-collaboration

The latter organisation is not necessarily a benchmark in IT, or organisation in general.

name one army which is. (Bundeswher is the german army)

When my company first started using Zoom, people were fumbling the controls constantly. In fact, people still do ("Can you see my screen?"), and no one knows what "Optimize for video clip" even means.

I don't think those other platforms are inherently worse, we're just slightly more familiar with Zoom.

I very much agree with this.

Zoom may be terrible from a security point of view; I dislike the fact that I may well have installed spyware on my machines; and I have absolutely no idea why in the nine hells the Android version complains that my phone is rooted (it should exist in a chroot!) but --- despite all of that --- it works.

Teams, in particular comparison, is like DIY dentistry with kitchen implements as surgical tools. It lags; it doesn't have a native client on any devices and turns them all into heaters; its codecs are nowhere near as good, and it can't display as many people on screen at one point in time -- and there's no private chat. I understand on one level why most organisations seem to want to force their staff to use Teams – it's "free" (if you already pay the microsoft tax) and comes with the corporation (±NSA) being the spying overlord, rather than "E2EE" (+China). However, I completely also understand why most users prefer Zoom. Frankly, I do too!

Dang, Webex is still that bad for you? Is it because you're using company's instances where it's more locked down and they're on older code?

I know it's not perfect, but it's pretty reliable for me (and full disclosure, I work for a different subsidiary of Cisco - but I also try to be pretty critical of it since I'm close to it)

I don't use Zoom a ton, but I've experienced what feels like a similar amount of sluggishness and AV issues as I have on Webex. At this point I know I'm a bit too close to have a useful anecdote, I'm just surprised that Webex is still put in the same group as Teams / Hangouts / GTM.

Again, not trying to sway you, just understand a bit better.

I found Webex to be quite a lot worse than Zoom in my limited experience. I attended a few IEEE presentations hosted on the platform. Audio didn't connect smoothly and needed a few restarts. The talk was constantly interrupted by a chiming noise whenever a person joined or left the meeting. I remember finding a configuration setting for this but the hosts didn't see my message (another bad feature), as this was a meeting-wide setting rather than a client one. Even if it were configurable per-user, that chime turned on is an unexpected and intrusive default setting.

Beyond that, I couldn't see the presented content in full-screen. There was a lot of junk in the form of perpetual UI elements for the "fullscreen mode".

These seemed like pretty fundamental misses for the platform to make.

I attended a webex earlier this year and I found the experience was far better than Zoom. The audio and video quality was better, and also the presentation controls were much more sophisticated.

this entry beep is a typical example of security vs. usability. The entry beep is meant for everyone to know if someone joined, even if they have joined using a phone only. It is also configurable. I think it was a huge mistake from cisco to make it a default though, the security benefit is too small. In the latest version is is now automatically disabled after 25 participants I believe, so they heard the feedback (took their time though).

Yeah, it's amazing to me the hate people have for Zoom.

I feel about Zoom like Garp felt about the plane that hit the house he was looking at buying. When the real estate agent said he wouldn't want to buy it now, he said The odds of another plane hitting this house are astronomical! and bought the house. I think it's unlikely Zoom will jeopardize their leadership by not taking security and privacy seriously.

two wrong assumptions:

* not taking security seriously can jeopardize their leadership (they're the de facto standard and no one cares about security as seen in these comments)

* Zoom is already taking security seriously - I seriously doubt it with all development being in China.

I hate Teams because of other issues[0], but the video and screen sharing are really good.

[0] It will occasionally leave artifacts on the screen if I put my laptop to sleep and wake it up. Just an empty rectangle in the notification area. I had to write a powershell script to cycle teams. And that's just one of the annoyances.

I never have issues with Hangouts. I think Zoom is a slightly better experience, but just making a Calendar invite in Google Calendar, and it automatically having the Hangout meeting is pretty nice.

[Edit] Google Meet

I use whereby and it’s always been without issue. They used to have a very good privacy policy too, but since they updated it I can’t make sense out of it

I've been a heavy user of GoToMeeting for over a decade. It works very, very well for us, and our use case is entirely multi-org meetings.

If someone has shitty home internet (a COVID-era problem), then they should probably dial in separately and not use the meeting audio, but that's going to hurt you no matter what meeting tool you use.

Have not experienced this myself, but it could be due to poor network connectivity.

What i find annoying about Teams, is the ability to use 100% CPU and 90% of the integrated graphics on a laptop.

Thankfully disabling GPU hardware acceleration have helped quite a lot.

Do you ask for a comparable alternative when a road gets closed or slowed down? Or when a particular, well working, herbicide gets banned? Or when carrying guns openly gets banned? Did you ask for a comparable alternative to leaded fuel?

Tandem is still new and has bugs but it’s never been a meeting killer. It doesn’t really have a guest access feature yet, though (at least to my knowledge).

Hangouts would surely have the same problem since I doubt Google can rule out the possibility that your video streams are being relayed through frontend servers outside the EU. The only way you could really control it is to use the old school approach to video conferencing: legacy standards like SIP or h.323 with all of the usability problems that implies, or WebRTC with your own STUN/TURN services ... and all of the usability problems that implies.

- "You can't marry your sibling."

- "Offer a comparable alternative then"

See the problem with this approach?

Other big services sometimes solve this problem by creating a data center in EU for European customers (DataDog, 1password, etc.). I don’t know how feasible could that be in Zoom’s case technically, but if they see a threat of losing customers because of GDPR they might dedicate such resources.

I've seen this argument used many times against GDPR regulations.

Who are obligated to provide an alternative? And why?

It's not like the police is obligated to give drug abusers something in return for the drugs that they are confiscating.

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