Let me preface this by saying I've never been a big fan of Microsoft Teams. It's a tool I have to use for work now and then because our customers do. Up until a few days ago I was able to take part in meetings via Teams using the Linux client. But all of a sudden (albeit unsuprisingly) clicking a teams link would not open the Linux client anymore, instead it redirects to a Teams PWA. In Q4 2022 Microsoft announced that the Teams Linux client will soon be retired in favour of a PWA. Unfortnuately at time of writing the PWA which should replace the linux desktop client is still unfit for use. It simply does not work to an extent where I can take part in meetings, receive audio-, video- and shared screen-feeds – at the same time.
So what Microsoft did to further the adoption of their PWA is instead of redirecting to an URL that makes the browser start the Linux client they redirect directly to their PWA.
Luckily given the meeting URL contructing the URL for the Linux client
is rather simple. You just need to replace
https://teams.microsoft.com with msteams:. The resulting URL can
be opened directly with Teams (or indirectly via xdg-open) by passing
it as an argument. (AFAIK there is no option in the Teams GUI to open a
meeting link.)
Here is a bash alias that does the job for you:
alias pott='f() { xdg-open ${1/https:\/\/teams.microsoft.com/msteams:} }; f'
The alias is called by passing the meeting url (in quotes, because fancy characters)
% pott "https://teams.microsoft.com/l/..."
This will open the Linux client as you were used to when clicking a link to a Teams meeting – at least for now.
Just in case you're wondering, we called it "pott" which stands for "Plain Old Terrible Teams". We fully expect you to rename the alias to your preference. Here are some ideas to get you going (it really depends on where you're standing):
- polt: Plain Old Linux Teams
- polt: Plain Old Lovely Teams
- dntdpwa: Definitly Not The Defunct PWA
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