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Comment by hdivider | Hacker News Reader

I really hope you're right. The challenge with Linux still seems to be practicalities -- like in particular, does Zoom run well on most distributions?

Reports seem to be of system crashes and degraded performance. I imagine there are lots of 'it works for me' stories, but think: for Linux to eat into Windows user market share (which I would greatly support), critical things like Zoom have to work at least as reliably as on Windows. For nontechnical users who would never figure out which incantations to type into the terminal to fix it -- because they have their next meeting in 15 minutes.

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I installed PopOS (22) and zoom worked fine right off the bat. So did steam and all my steam games. Heck even my printer worked. (It has since become more temperamental and now only works with one of the 3 print dialogues on my Linux box...)

My game controller worked, my BT headset, the media keys on my keyboard even worked.

Lots of stuff was mildly broken but no more so than it was on Windows. It is just differently broken.

How many hours has Zoom put into making the client stable on Windows and Mac?

How many hours have they put into the Linux client?

My guess is the answer to these questions indicate more of how it got there than anything the distros or upstream components can do.

> How many hours has Zoom put into making the client stable on Windows and Mac?

Users don't really care, do they?

I'm not talking about that. I was replying to a claim that Zoom is less stable on a platform, as if that somehow happened for free and not as a result of a team tracking and fixing bugs on the application side, likely over the course of years.

> like in particular, does Zoom run well on most distributions?

It works fine (tested on Arch), but at the very least you should run that kind of malware as a separate user, or better yet, in a VM.

Limiting it to a browser tab is sufficient :)

Even my Starbook, so... literally made for Linux, doesn't do things like going to sleep when I close the lid. It made me switch back to my Mac because despite being able to, I have a life and little time for my main work device to decide to not work randomly.

Linux is never, and I mean never going to be a legitimate alternative to Windows or MacOS on the desktop under the current paradigm. "Switch to X desktop or distro" means less than zero to 99.9% of computer users (probably a few more nines in there too).

"Oh but the Steam Machine!" essentially no one who uses that will actually care what the OS is, it's a shell and a very specific one to do a single task, no-one is buying it as a general purpose machine they can do their taxes on.

Yes, precisely. And then as I anticipated, the "it works for me" stories, even here in this thread. Wish we could get past this steady-state in the Linux ecosystem.

Imagine a Linux distro largely displaced Windows and Mac simply due to usability, security, reliability, and the fact that there's no monstrous corporation pulling the strings. That would be awesome.

Works fine on recent Ubuntu and Fedora, both Wayland and X.

"Fine" and not amazing because occasionally I have screen sharing issues, but that's like once in a blue moon? Could be down to my specific configuration, but it's allegedly more stable than my coworker's zoom on Mac.

Zoom works fine for me on Ubuntu. Or at least, it's no more flaky than it is on Mac.

I mean... Windows legitimately doesn't work. I work at one of the mag7 and it's a running jokes while using windows that suddenly everyone's microphone quits. We then have to restart. This has been going on years. Our colleagues on Linux don't have such problems.

It's just that we accept windows issues as "that's how computers are". While Linux is expected to work

I haven't used Zoom in years, but Teams in the browser on Linux runs better than Teams natively on Windows. Which is odd, since I understand it is just an electron app on Windows, so it is effectively running in the browser anyway. Still, those of us on Linux have way fewer audio and connectivity issues.

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