The good part is that it's a very good tool for that. Meeting quality is usually good to excellent. Screen sharing works, as well as whiteboards. In case there is disruption or vandalism there are readily available controls to quickly secure the meeting room. Audio quality is good, video too.

Moreover, I use Linux, and I intend to implement the whole MS groupware client-side in my desktop applications, such as Kontact/KMail. Teams is covered by a good webapp wrapper done by Ismael Martínez that behaves like a normal desktop app, with system tray capability included (https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux).

But the really bad part is that this is... a Microsoft product requiring authentication mediated by Microsoft. And (speaking from my particular situation, that is, from Asunción, Paraguay) it's a stinking mess. There are ISPs that fail to authenticate due to an unexplained error (they don't even offer those awful hexadecimal error codes). Some ISP can authenticate using their mobile networks, but residential ones fail. And even when authentication supposedly works, switching from consumer (private) Outlook to corporate Outlook is fraught with various failure points.

Teams works well... once you managed to login. I will never forget that I had to give a substitute class for someone and getting access to that specific classroom took me over 90 minutes between retries, delays, silent fails, etc. The stuff of nightmares.

Another really bad part of Teams is that usability and UX are also nightmarish. You open the app and it is not apparent at all how to create an instant meeting. There is the functionality, but it's not easily discoverable at all. How do you manage the access of people to chat, for example? Some people can use the chat, while others can't access to it. And how to fix that, is by no means apparent. So Teams, while being the sensible solution here and even from a Linux user standpoint is reasonably nice, can be quite painful to use.

Now, about what TFA said, about Teams or Slack costing a tiny fraction of what an engineer earns... let me tell you that in our neck of the woods salaries are really low. If you can manage USD 1K/month, you are quite fortunate. So any "fraction of the cost" taken by either Teams or Slack, is not that tiny. Moreover, at least in educational contexts, Slack is not that well-known (to be honest, it's practically unknown here), so Slack does not have the mindshare that Teams has here.

So, about Teams: the product is there and is reasonably good in its foundations. If Microsoft only could set its mind to smooth the rough edges it could have been a real winner.

I now switched to Ioskeley Mono, which is an Iosevka configuration made to look similar to Berkeley Mono:

https://github.com/ahatem/IoskeleyMono

Either the Iosevka originals or Ioskeley are gorgeous fonts. I'm grateful to its creator.

For example, what about a new clone of Macromedia's Free Hand? or Adobe's Page Maker? Or MS Front Page, vibecoded to be compliant with the latest W3C standards?

And it works really well. I can use it and exchange documents with people using Word without problem in the enormous majority of the cases.

And the fact that LibreOffice is a real GUI app built using the WIMP paradigm instead of that stupid ribbon interface that forces me to use the mouse, is a very significant net positive for me.

People who say that LibreOffice has a bad UI or that is a bad piece of software are just more vocal.

I think peak keycaps font were the ones used in the Epson QX-10, Epson HX-20, Tandy 100, and the common C-64.

I messaged the moderators asking for a reinstatement, and not only the ban was not lifted; the mods taunted me via DMs.

Well, no problem. I just was helping people use Linux and that desktop environment better, and also helping to clarify many myths and misconceptions that were formed over the years in that desktop environment. I just left the subreddit and as someone here said, the only winning move is not to play.

Some people are just idiots and whatever power they have gets to their head. It's human nature.

And no, I'm not "overwhelmingly" pro-AI. Especially since many of us know that the AI concept is storied and goes a long time even before our generation, and this LLM-based AI isn't really AI in a proper sense.

This "AI" has some good uses, granted, but the cost-benefit ratio is stupidly bad. For all the benefits that I can see with AI, if this means that I have to put up with scrapers aggressively ruining the Web, data centers gobsmacking available resources, and getting GPU and memory prices gouged to death on me, I'd rather pass. It's not an attractive proposition, simply stated.

Worse yet, I teach; and AI-enabled cheating is making my work much harder.

So, pardon me if I'm a little unenthusiastic about this newfangled artificial intelligence that isn't.

But I think this is perhaps one of the first AI developments I actually like. Transitioning an app from React Native or any web technology to native code has the distinct advantage that the native version should be much more economical in its use of resources.

I'm tired of hearing about RAM and other components hiking their prices while at the same time RAM sizes of ~8 GB are considered too small because things like Electron apps are wasteful in their consumption of resources. Now, with more native apps, we might get full circle: leaner apps thanks to agentic development. Maybe someday 8 GB of RAM could be considered enough once again. Truly interesting.

If LA repairs a whole street, they also need to add wheelchair ramps because of ADA. This is expensive for them and they don't want to do that, so they do not do any repair or circumvent it.

You can download the original CDE here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/

Reading from the activity, it still seems to receive some fixes and updates although, as the SlackBuild author said, it would not be advisable to use it in an internet-facing desktop for security reasons.

NsCDE also behaves very well.

Otherwise, you can use Xfce which was heavily inspired by CDE; and now, even Plasma 6 have a very good CDE-like (or Motif) theme.

The peripherals were also noteworthy in the sense that you could have similar, "serious" peripherals such as good dot-matrix printers or floppy drives, than your father's "serious" CP/M or MS-DOS business computers; quite a difference from other home computers' idea of peripherals which were substandard or crippled equipment. That is, from peripherals alone, you could make a case of using C-64 even in serious business cases. And I know, I saw various cases where it was used with vertical or custom-made software packages in my country.

For hackers, the architecture was well understood, the memory map open and re-programmable, and the assembly was 6502 (I know the CPU was the slightly different 6510 but the opcodes were basically the same), which was fairly approachable for assembly programming.

You could get some or all of that, but, as the ad referenced by the TFA, you had to pay a lot more dollars for that.

EDIT: Now I see you installed it via flatpak. That is also a source of endless inconsistencies and instabilities. So you should maybe try the native fedora rpm.