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Comment by piousfraud | Hacker News Reader

I dunno man, we're in a Windows world. I word at an MSP and I am a linux enthusiast at heart, but I had to adapt to this Windows world and Teams is a huge part of that.

Do I wish that we could just use... idk an internal IRC server? Yeah sure, that'd be great.

But Teams allows us to organize meetings and communicate EFFECTIVELY.

Sometimes adaptation is a huge part of this industry, in my opinion. I think that if you dislike Teams, and can not adapt, you may not be effective in this job market unless you free-lance or find some small startup that ... doesn't use any of the modern communication applications.

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> we're in a Windows world.

Teams runs on Linux, and almost any conceivable alternative runs on Windows. I don't see what Windows has to do with it, other than suggesting a general cultural tolerance for bad user experience.

I think he means that office365 absolutely dominates.

I’ve actually been evaluating email providers for a small business, and it turns out that if you need:

1) shared mailboxes (that multiple people can manage)

2) sane auth[entication|orization]

3) retention of deleted emails

then there are only 2 players in the game: Microsoft and Google… and once you pick one of them, it makes sense to also buy into the rest of their respective ecosystems, since everything is well-integrated.

The choice then ends up coming down to whether your users prefer Google Docs/Sheets/Mail or Microsoft Word/Excel/Outlook…

are there really no other alternatives?

did you also evaluate standalone email platforms?

is there just no commercial email provider with those features or is there not even any tech out there that solves those problems?

with shared mailboxes i assume you mean the ability for multiple people to access mails to an address and have everyone synced on responses without sharing login.

There really are no other [sane] alternatives ... unless you want to go to 50 vendors to save 50 cents per user per year on licensing (and waste 50 hours a month of everyone's time trying to get them use tools that don't integrate in any understandable/low-friction manner)

this is not about saving money, but about avoiding the behemoths that dominate the market. it would be rather disappointing if the options were so limited.

This is a business decision

Wasting 10s or 100s or 1000s of 1000s of hours of time across an organization is stupid just for the sake of "avoiding the behemoths that dominate the market"

sleeping better at night because the fate of my business does not depend on the whims of these companies is also a business decision

As a business owner, do you want to be concerned about one company's potential whims? Or 50?

i prefer 50 because the likelihood of them failing or denying service all at once is lower. much lower. this goes beyond email, but it would be insane to put put everything my business depends on into the hands of a single company.

That's not a rational business decision

The fewer the points of failure, the better

Your choice of 50 unrelated, unintegrated vendors introduces 50 single points of failure to business

That's incredibly stupid - unless you truly have no choice

It introduces a huge amount of unnecessary risk to the company, and immense overhead in additional personnel (product admins, contract management, vulnerability monitoring, end user time/training, etc)

It's why multicloud is mostly not a thing: outside of a few niche cases, running cloud workloads across multiple providers is more expensive than running it all in one. Sure GCP might have something that's cheaper than AWS, and AWS than Azure, and Azure than GCP - but now you have to manage data going into and out of three providers instead of one, three separate contracts, three sets of credential groups, etc

Re: shared mailboxes, yes, correct.

I've been doing a bit more research and I have to amend my previous comment: there's also Zoho, which has its own ecosystem.

Other than that, all of the standalone email providers seem to be running a standard Linux or Windows email stack (i.e. Postfix/Dovecot/Roundcube or Exchange Server). The Linux stack doesn't seem to be able to do it (well, either that or the providers don't offer it).

Exchange Server might be able to do it, but it looks hard to wrangle it together with other tools. Even the Exchange hosting providers just give up and resell MS365 at that point (e.g. https://www.combell.com/en/email-hosting/exchange-hosting, https://www.combell.com/en/work-online-office365).

It's been over a decade since I've used Windows for anything other than testing that something works on Windows. Most software engineers I know are in a similar position.

I suppose if I wanted to work a a really big company, that would change, but the "Windows world" feels more like a historical relic than a present reality.

This is terrible advice, easily the worst answer thus far.

Anyone who has any difficulty finding non-MS-bound openings is looking in the wrong places.

In Pittsburgh, I have not been able to find a company that lets software engineers use OS X or Linux. I'm actively looking so I'll be very happy to be proven wrong if anyone knows of a place.

Try Google? I am certain they have an office. Maybe automotive companies like Aurora. Or NLP related companies like Duolinguo.

> In Pittsburgh

i've never been, but that might be part of why.

You don't need to look in Pittsburgh anymore. Many, many companies now hire remote literally anywhere at all, particularly those located in New York City.

Not everyone works in software.

In mechanical and aero engineering, it’s 100% Windows.

Depends where you are I guess. When I attend conferences these days--which to be fair tend to be open source-oriented although not exclusively--I see very little Windows in use and, to be honest, more MacOS than Linux in general.

To the topic at hand I've used Teams a couple times. Don't remember it being especially good or bad and probably wouldn't otherwise be a deal-breaker on a job I really wanted to take. But I probably prefer either Zoom or Google Meet.

OP didn't say this, but it's probably more that Teams rarely stands alone.

If they're using Teams then surely they are also using office365 and exchange & outlook and you probably are forced to use a MS account and a laptop running Windows and must use Outlook.

If they used Teams, but you didn't actually have to spend all day on Teams, and everything else was fine, you could work on your own linux machine and use thunderbird for email, and you just had to fire up the linux Teams occasionally, then that should be fine.

But if you have to be logged in all day, even if everything else is good, then it's effectively a large part of your life and you should seek to identify such things rather than just suffer them.

I think the argument for Teams falls apart when Slack, not IRC, is factored into the equation. The only argument that is justifiable for Teams is if you're on O365 is slots into your organization easily, outside of that Teams is pretty bad. It's main selling point seems to be "you already have it". It's as if MS execs pointed at Slack and said "engineers make us that" and gave them a weekend to do it. The UX on Slack is almost unusable. It's some of what Slack does but with about 5 more clicks needed per operation, assuming you can even do the operation.

> we're in a Windows world

There are at least dozens of us linux workers here

Of course there are -- and thats great. But... the point is the same. Not many businesses these days are using a linux stack. Is it unfortunate? Yes. Do I like it? no. But working in IT in any capacity means that you have to adapt... thats my main point.

I frankly think you have it backwards. Practically the majority of business server+cloud software runs on Linux, unless you're a literal desktop janitor.

Perhaps this comment that I left elsewhere in this thread might interest you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30266721

Teams only show 4 streams at a time on Linux, the video/audio quality is mediocre and the video quality in the webclient is worse than the one using an Electron container, probably to force the app. Screensharing always tends to get stuck after a while, and they ignore any requests to start supporting Wayland, even while it takes minimal changes(update Electron).

Nowadays it's easy to setup your own conference server, and use webbased clients that don't require yet another Electron container. For instance, Galene(https://github.com/jech/galene) is an excellent resource-friendly SFU built on top of Pion(Golang).

Shameless plug: I'm the author of Pyrite(https://github.com/garage44/pyrite), an alternative WebRTC frontend for Galene

>Nowadays it's easy to setup your own conference server

Not something any normal business has any business worrying about

Want to do it for funsies on your own time? Cool

For work? No

That's not sane

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