Is MS Teams on Linux Safe?

I know you can use Teams on Ubuntu. Is it safe, or can MS spy on things outside of Teams?

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I don’t think it does anything weird, but why not just use a PWA?

I’m just curious. I haven’t tried it in some time. About a year or more ago when it first became available, I tried it since we need it for work. I was having issues screen sharing and other things. So I gave up.

That’s likely a browser issue. Which one are you on?

Not sure about Teams, but Zoom at one point did not allow screen share when used in a browser.

Using it in a browser instead of the app is the best you can do to limit the privacy risks. Unless you feel comfortable using a VM.

I was using Firefox at the time. In fact, I tried it again last week. Still had troubled. Teams is only available on Linux as a PWA. I was having a lot of trouble getting people to hear me, even though my Blue microphone was showing and selected. I had to revert to the built in laptop mic just to have calls.

Try a chromium-based browser like Brave since many sites work on chromium specifically.

if you use the native app they could, yes, unless you sandbox it

relevant. Sandboxes the web app in Electron

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Microsoft teams removed native app for Linux.

I try from web browser, chrome, brave, firefox, Edge-browser, without any config (zero installation), I could not open the web page of microsoft-teams.

I only tried from Fedora latest stable version (which is also fresh install). I dont not have any package installed or config changed.

I don’t want to trust 3rd parties like this app:

But I tried it. It also gives me same error. There is no error by the way. The screen is blank. The browser console has Javascript eror logs which are not valuable (there is no any technology name or something… Its their internal Javascript’s errors)

Could anybody able to open a meeting on last 2 months?

Note: You don’t have to login to join a meeting on Microsoft-teams.

I used it regularly on Linux via a browser, but only with a separate ‘general’ browser. Here’s what I mean…

I normally use only pro-privacy browsers like LibreWolf, Mullvad, etc… However, I also keep a ‘general’ browser on my Linux device (Firefox) which doesn’t have all the privacy settings I would normally apply to any browser. This general browser serves me well whenever one of my privacy browsers is having any trouble.

This has worked great so far. This ‘normal’ Firefox is my fallback browser which I only use when I absolutely must use something which isn’t so great for privacy, like Teams.

If you really can’t use Teams via a browser, then it might not be the browser which is the problem. Have you applied an extra-strict customization in your VPN, or some other extra-strict setting in some other part of your setup which affects your internet connection? That might be the cause of your problem.

I had that experience once when I had trouble using FreeTube. It turns out that I had applied such overly-strict settings in my VPN that it was blocking the invidious API too. Relaxing my VPN settings a bit made things work better from there on. Maybe something like that is causing the problem for you.

@Sectional2932

I do the same thing. I have hardened-browser for daily use, and anothter Firefox with no configuration.

Teams does not work on any browser without any config. My OS also does not have any config. Its fresh install.

I don’t use VPN or proxy or something.

Note: I also create a zero firefox profile, and I disable also all default privacy features. Even after that, teams still not working :frowning:

Seems like MS is punishing non-windows usage of MS Teams. Consider using a VM?

I started it inside VM. but on job intervews they want me to share my deesktop and write me code on my IDE.

VM (ms-windows quest) + IDE + Teams with camera want to high memory and CPU :confused:

This privacy protection makes my life really difficult for last 10 years :frowning:

It’s possible that your distro is missing some codexes/drivers. US-based distros (e.g. Fedora) are often often missing something like that due to licensing.

I got around that by uninstalling the natively pre-installed Firefox, and instead installing the Firefox Flatpak, which includes additional codexes/drivers.

Perhaps your distro has a help section about additional packages to help with multi-media.

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I had try all of those:

But I will try with Firefox-Flatpak too.

HAPPY NEWS:

It worked via Firefox Flatpak.

@Sectional2932 Thank you :slight_smile: I want to understand the background of your answer. Why it worked? All other browsers which I had try didn’t have those codecs? Which codecs we talking about by the way? Not video codec right?

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I’m happy it worked for you.

I’m not 100% sure, but I think it’s because of the FFmpeg libraries. The Flatpak includes some missing library members.

Originally I installed Firefox as a Flatpak for security/privacy, because I wanted it to be containerized the way other Flatpaks are. Then I was delighted to see that it could play online multimedia better than the natively pre-installed app on Fedora. I searched online to find the explanation, and various explanations all revolved around FFmpeg libraries.

I’m glad you are able to use Linux the way you want now.

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On QEMU/KVM if you do not use system-session (runs VM with root level permissions) you can not use some features. Is same thing exist on Flatpak?

–system or --user may change the behavior on Flatpak?

Sorry, I don’t know. I’m still learning the technical side of Linux.