Microsoft Teams on Linux

When setting up my laptop, I decided to see just how much of my everyday workload I could replicate in Linux. Turns out that over the past few years, the answer has become “a lot.” That’s because Electron has taken the world by storm. The downside is that applications tend to be huge, but the plus side is that I get them for Linux with relatively little effort from the developers. That’s a trade-off I’m generally willing to make.

One of the most surprising apps with support is Microsoft Teams. Teams is still considered a Preview on Linux and has been since 2019. That said, it does get regular updates and installs very easily using the Snap package manager.

I haven’t used Teams on Linux that much, but my experience with it so far is that it does seem to work pretty well. I can create and join meetings, create and delete channels, create and open menu tabs, and do most of the interactions with Teams that I’d expect. The built-in integration with Office works as you’d expect, letting you read and edit documents in Teams without having Office installed.

The best meetings are the ones you have with yourself.

It’s not a battery hog or memory/CPU killer. According to powertop, it barely draws battery when I’m not actively using it, and top says it uses maybe 0.5-1% of CPU for background polling. Given the reputation certain builds of Teams have had with respect to chewing up resources, I’m not complaining about this, at least not unless I see a marked uptick in resource utilization.

I imagine that as I use this more often, I’ll probably run into some issues with Teams. The tricky part will be figuring out if it’s a Teams on Linux issue or a Teams issue in general—the latter happen often enough on Windows that it may not be easy to tell.

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