MS Teams is the worst software I've ever used. This is not hyperbole. A room full of monkeys on a typewriter would never create something as bad as teams.
And why there isn't the ability to just delete the rich text formatting and write markdown I do not know. They can't build a bug free rich text editor or one with intuitive controls. It's the same problem I have with Jira, the rich text editor just does not work like it should.
This changed, as in broke, around a week ago. At least for me, on Win 11.
Edit: Just remembered another Teams bug from a few days ago: cut text from the middle of paragraph, paste it back in earlier in the same paragraph, ... and it appears in a smaller font.
But yeah, it's really silly how they manage to break things like this. One would think they have a test-suite specifically for their shitty editor to prevent things like this - apparently not the case. Welp.
It's not yet skype-levels of bad, where doing _anything_ beyond simple text was impossible, but it seems they're slowly getting their, update by update.
My Android client randomly signs me out, sometimes multiple times per day.
This can be remidiated by using the editor mode, albeit I found it frustrating still.
Teams put a nobreak space or something in the code that looked like a ordinary space in the diff. I am still abit mad :)
Looks like all commercial chat-software is destined to become terrible garbage, one A/B-test at a time.
If I remember correctly, there is some difference between voice call chat rooms and the instant messaging chat rooms. I don't remember which messed up whitespace. Or if I copied between chats etc.
Can't trust the text anyhow.
We used this prior to Teams, and in comparison, Teams is great. I'm guessing a lot of Teams users come from Skype for Business, so they are really happy with the improvements.
The server infrastructure was a bit of a shitshow, if you ever had to maintain an on-premise deployment, and it must have been a complete clusterfuck to run the Skype for Business Online SAAS service they were offering. So I can understand why they did away with it, but I'm still very irritated that this many years into Teams, it's such an unfinished mess...
Everything else is horrible - note taking is useless, the chat is full of visual noise and slow, the calendar is mostly useless and takes too long to update, file sharing is infamously convoluted etc.
We currently use Slack for chat and Teams for audio/video calls and I quite like this setup. Slack is absolutely horrible for audio/video calls, so moving to it entirely is a no-go, hope the company will keep being ok to pay for both.
Both have great sound quality other than that.
- some times the left arrow to move the cursor doesn't work
- some times images are displayed and others not
- can't have more than 4 people on screen in a video call
- the scroll is completely broken
- can't get out of the immersive mode without closing the process (the back arrow doesn't work)
And the list goes on and on...
A/V issues, navigation, inability to find an existing conversation / conference (happening now on another computer) on a GNU/Linux machine, etc are almost secondary.
I needed to change my work password twice already because I accidentally sent it to somebody when Teams suddenly popped up and took focus away from my VPN client and I hit enter.
This also makes it impossible to resize the window. Well, sometimes. There are times when it works, and I have no idea what makes it work.
Thankfully, I usually use Qubes OS which doesn't let programs do these user-hostile things.
As a workaround, I'm pretty sure that KDE supports Alt (or meta) + right click for resizing.
I wouldn't even try running Teams on Linux, as I'm sure it's an endless source of frustration (much more intense than on Windows or on the browser). But the one nice thing of Linux is that you can force apps to behave.
You can if you use it in Chrome. I thought Teams was an Electron application, which makes this even more strange.
There is jack, pulse, alsa and now pipewire for sound. On the system you can have multiple sound devices some available fully working only through pipewire, others fully working only through pulse.
If you want your app to integrate into your desktop nicely (basic thing like using tray icons) you can have completely different behaviors on different distros because there is so much variability.
Pipewire is now taking over a lot of things regarding audio/video. With fedora already fully on it. Great but the documentation is in a miserable state. Very few examples. Some distros while have pipewire running, using it for audio will just not work.
The only good thing about it is video calling. Without testing this, I always feel it's much faster/smoother and has better screen sharing quality. Also the launch screen does a great job (in comparison to Zoom for example)
Video call on Teams is actually pretty good, but everything else just seems half-baked, thrown together without a plan. The GUI is non-intuitive, basic features are unstable, absent or hidden away. Work for a company that doesn’t use ActiveDirectory and Exchange… well now your in for at really bad time.
Another way to think of it is that the deep integration to AD and Exchange is the major reason IT departments like Teams. The video and audio calling is fine, the chat works, although it seems to annoy Slack users. The meeting calendar syncs with Exchange. Planner boards give a simple Kanban setup. File storage with Sharepoint and Onedrive integration mean that the stored files work almost like they are on my computer.
At least the audio is consistently good, though.
Monkeys could barely create software if at all. That means you have set a low badness bar for Teams to surpass.
Teams is not great, but for an enterprise-tier collaboration solution that can do chat, voice, telephony, and video, it's better than its alternatives. It's far better than its predecessor, Skype for Business (fka Lync).
Given the alternative for us would be slack+zoom+gsuite, which all have impressively daunting privacy concerns as well as pretty crappy usability themselves, I (and the people I am collaborating with regularly) am really happy with Teams.
The endless branching feature list also results in broken spaghetti code that creates a horrible subjective and inconsistent experience.