Technology

My employer has the usual setup of M365 enterprise shit running on Dell laptops.

Fortunately we devs are able to "dual boot" to run Linux on our machines, since our product is an embedded Linux system. (has anybody seen my Windows partition btw? I can't even find anything NTFS formatted, whoopsie!)

All that background info is just so I can pay Microsoft a compliment, even if it has asterisks all over it:

The entire Microsoft suite works just fine in a browser, and in LibreWolf too! I do typically add some permissions for those sites for convenience, since librewolf is privacy/tracking hardened (firefox fork) out of the box. I use Teams and Outlook every day, and occasionally will drop a file into OneDrive or edit something in MS Office. I don't write many office-format documents though, so I'm more likely to be in LibreOffice or a PDF viewer just reading a doc.

You know how in media streaming and gaming there's that balance of whether it is more convenient to be a paying customer versus pirate everything?

Microsoft's stuff is literally better to use in Linux. Even if I need to test the Windows build of something, a VM is SO much more convenient. And I'm not even logged into the microsoft shit on that. If I need something from OneDrive, I go to the browser there too.

I swear people do not understand the point of what microsoft does.

There isn't a team tasked with making teams worse. They're tasked with extracting all possible value out of their product. Part of that value is infromation like where you are, what you're doing, what you're talking about, what you search for, what you actually do for your job, who is around you, what they talk about, where they are, what they are doing, what they search for, and what they do for their job and how everyone spends their money.

All of this is incredibly valuable data to governments, businesses and private individuals that want to advertise, suppress dissenting political voices, enhance useful dissenting political voices, and otherwise manipulate global influence.

They just don't want you to think about declining any permissions, triggering regulatory action, or switching to another platform.

They've crossed the line a long long time ago. All microslop products are straight up unusable.

Microsoft: Our product is not our software. It's you!

Microslop

And the name of that team: Microsoft

God damn it, at work they pay us to put that stuff on our personal phones... maybe I've been a bit too lenient on that, maybe I should get a work phone.

Linux Mint is very easy to use.

There’s a web client. I’ll use that from now on if I have to. Should I use any particular browser that prevents access to WiFi details?

I wonder if the web client can be bookmarked to my desktop with the Teams icon.

I worked on a large(ish) contract (tens of millions) with one of Microsoft’s engineering teams where they were implementing an Azure managed version of software we produced. I would regularly refuse to install teams at the meetings, using teams in-browser only.

It also ensured that the technical project manager had to be the one to transcribe anything in our notes into whatever tools Microsoft was using.

While it was never said, the Microsoft engineers seemed to completely understand and never pushed back against my refusal to a) install crapware and b) not take on work that wasn’t mine.

Not using teams: win win.

The users aren't the customers. The customers are the users' bosses.

This is illegal in Norway :)

To be fair, this is barely a feature. If you are on WIFI anyone that really cares knows where you are already

Before Teams when Evilcorp was using Skype for business the app would update our location within the building.

I was gonna use teams for a few groups of people, but fuck this noise. What are the best alternatives? Something like slack or discord but those have their issues too