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Comment by vladvasiliu | Hacker News Reader

> the MacOS and Linux versions are left to die basically.

I hate Teams as much as the next guy, but I'm not sure what you mean by this. On Linux, I have version 1.4.00.26453, vs 1.4.00.32771 on Windows 11 (installed fresh today).

Also, the Windows experience is just as atrocious as on Linux, so for once I don't get the feeling that Linux is a second-class citizen. If anything, all citizens are last-class.

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The version numbers are lying. The Linux version is missing important features, like seeing more than 4 participants at the same time, or blurring the background. Also, for some reason it is often not possible to see the camera picture of participants when they start screen sharing (if they are using the Linux version, that is).

I don't know about the number of participants, luckily I've never been in a mammoth call. As for the background blur, it may be related to a missing feature in Electron. I seem to remember that another conferencing app (might have been zoom, not sure) didn't support this while running on Chrome/Linux, so I figure it's related.

To me, the main missing feature on Linux is the "native notifications" feature (as opposed to the bespoke window that pops up).

There's a lot of missing features like those mentioned above, is the reply option with a quote already working in Linux? Been using MacOS since the MBP14" came out and haven't booted by PopOS desktop since I'm not at home

> is the reply option with a quote already working in Linux?

Yes, and it has for a while. I don't use it that often, though, so I can't comment since when it works.

As a long time Linux user and one that has suffered through multiple versions of teams/slack/zoom/Google Meet I was pleasantly surprised with Google Meet (in chromium) for video calls. It worked flawlessly, adapted really well to a super wide monitor (actually used the space well), and had the background blurring/replacement features that get stripped from most linux clients, the only downside was that it didn't like screensharing in Firefox.

This is interesting. I've actually had a very jarring experience with Google meet. My webcam image, for some reason, would be squished, like it attempted to constrain it to 4:3 when it's 16:9. But the end image wasn't 4:3, there would be vertical bands on the sides. However, while waiting in the lobby for a meeting, the preview worked fine. This happened on both Firefox and Chrome (actual Chrome, not Chromium), and with multiple people.

The exact same setup worked perfectly in Teams, Zoom and OBS.

I don't think it's a limitation with electron on Linux. One time I joined a meeting with an external org, and probably due to some bug in teams I suddenly got more features like e.g. background blur. The next meeting a couple of hours later the features were gone again.

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