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Comment by baja_blast | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

you can disable said client on startup...

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