Re: [tlug] Corona and schools in Japan

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull.stephen.fw@example.com>]

Daniel A. Ramaley writes:

 > My University uses Teams for everything. We're even migrating our phones
 > to it. But it sucks. A Linux client was recently released. It is
 > packaged for several distributions and installs cleanly with no
 > dependencies. But it doesn't work. When i run it on my Debian system it
 > shows up in the process table but never opens a window.

Good to know; I won't put effort into it until I have some time.

 > So strange that it was released with such obvious faults.

Could it be a GNOME vs. KDE kind of thing?  X vs. Wayland?

Aside from the usual M$FT-bashing, I think it's a good sign that Linux
on the desktop has become a factor they can't ignore.  I wouldn't be
surprised if the developers are running Linux in a Windows-hosted VM
or just using the POSIX API, too, rather than running it on native
Linux distros with no Windows support.  I know some of my Python
buddies who work at Microsoft have occasional issues because of that.
Usually it's good enough but ... :-)

The "no dependencies" thing seems weird, too.  I guess that's because
they have some kind of Windows emulation API built into the application.

 > I don't really like it as a chat client because the UI is too
 > big. But that's a personal preference. Most of my coworkers who are
 > still stuck on Windows actually like Teams. I guess it works well
 > on their platform. Go figure.

I think it's a cultural difference.  They're used to the unnecessary
complexity of Windows UIs.  And after all, mastery of complexity is
satisfying, even if objectively speaking the complexity is
unnecessary.  I feel that way about LaTeX and HTML, for example,
although for almost all of my day-to-day purposes Markdown[1] is plenty. :-)

Steve

Footnotes: 
[1]  In practice I use reStructuredText myself, but of course Markdown
is now ubiquitous in web UIs like GitHub and MediaWiki.