I just got rid of my last Windows computer and switched to Linux full time. I’m forced to use Zoom to attend online lectures at my university and WOW is the Linux client for Zoom terrible compared to Windows. For one, it doesn’t have an option to have the gallery view above the screen share view, only beside it, which wastes screen space. It also forces itself into full screen mode whenever someone starts sharing their screen, AND when I switch it back to windowed mode, it’s not maximized even when it was before. It also launches a blank “join a meeting” window alongside the active meeting every time I click on a meeting from Canvas (my University’s course management system) or switch into a breakout group. Finally, for some reason it forcibly disables KDE’s power management modes whenever it’s active.
Screw you Zoom. Fix your shitty software on Linux!
Skype client is even worse according to me, when speaking of video conferencing apps. The out of focus pop-up is so annoying (even if I only recently noticed it can be disabled), especially with tilling wm’s, since it reserve a space for itself. This tiny pop-up can’t be resized to make it more bearable, as a PiP window, and only make you use the main program window instead. Speaking of which, they still haven’t seems to figure out how to make their background webcam feature work. They know how to blur it, but not how to put selected pictures. Despite that, they added this option without testing it, making those buttons totally useless. And don’t get me started on the stupid Firefox user-agent block (Which can be bypassed with add-on too).
I long for the day where blocking browsers based on user agent can be punished as anticompetitive behaviour. Like I get that you didn’t test it on Firefox or you think it’ll perform badly, but just let me try it! I can’t think of any actually harmful effect that using an unintended browser can cause, and I feel like there aren’t any.