Comment by funcDropShadow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by funcDropShadow | Hacker News Reader

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I've been using Zoom on Gnome almost daily in the last three years. I've basically no problem with video conference itself. Video just works for me. But audio is a never ending story. Zoom randomly selects other audio devices, when I quit one video session and start another. Sometimes, I have to to quit zoom and start it again. Sometimes I have to disconnect my table speaker/microphone to be able to use it in zoom again. It still works with every other software I've tried. When I start zoom, I get the dialog to share crash information 95% of the times I start zoom. Zoom is not able to store my account password or even the username under linux. So, when I open my macbook, it's zoom client wakes up, disconnects my zoom client on linux and I have to go fetch my zoom password from 1password once more. The zoom client under linux fails to safe room passwords all the time. The Zoom client makes it extra hard to call it with command line args to open a special room including password immediately. I could go on. It is just a huge pain in the ... . But most "entreprise grade" competitors are far worse.

Even though my experience with Zoom under Linux is much smoother, I can confirm the "random audio device" issue; it may be daunting. And the inability to accept command-line arguments is a choice, not a technical problem.

Another fun bit: the same version of Zoom on the same hardware (T470, i5) offers virtual background support under Windows, and disables it under Linux. The machine has no dedicated GPU to have driver issues with.

Virtual Background works perfectly for me on Linux. On a laptop with nvidia hardware.

(On Fedora 34, xorg)

Yes, it works for me on NVidia hardware under Linux, too.

What's interesting is that the hardware requirements for the virtual background seem to be higher under Linux than under Win10.

As of very recently, like within the past month, same here. They rolled out just a simple blurred background slightly earlier. Running latest Pop! OS.

I've had luck by adding OBS to the setup. OBS connects to the real webcam and microphone, does whatever magic I want, and exposes the results as a virtual webcam that Zoom uses.

I eventually stopped using OBS because it was overkill, but it worked very well.

Are you using Wayland? My wife saw functions disappear with a recent Zoom update on her quite old laptop, and starting her GNOME session via GNOME on X11 restored those functions.

Same audio issues here. Zoom always wants to set my mic level to 0 and change the default output source for whatever reason.

My last company used Teams which I had a much better experience with on Linux (gnome+xorg) than Zoom.

Teams is terrible on Linux for me, but which thing is broken changes from version to version.

A few examples:

- My USB headset only works for the first call. Restarting teams let's me use it for one more call

- joining a meeting from the calendar spins forever. Doing it from the chat list works fine

- incoming calls don't ring my Linux teams, but ring everywhere else

- the settings for setting which device to use rarely have any effect; I can use any pulse mixer to switch though

Or that it presumably makes use of override_redirect, as it escapes the X WM decorations, and draws its own windows not fitting in to the style of one's WM.

That is then made worse if one uses the ability to pop out a chat in a new window, such that it is very difficult to see the popped out chat.

I've resorted to always running the web version in a Chromium instance, that being the only way to make its UI usable.

Oddly enough, the macOS client is a bit more usable, but I've not tried popped out windows there.

Over and above that, it seems to be a bandwidth hog while just sitting there watching an idle chat/team/channel.

Something I'd not use if it hadn't been adopted as the corporate "solution" at $EMPLOYER.

Oh, I had that problem.

Settings, Audio, uncheck Automatically adjust microphone volume.

on the mute button, there's a tiny arrow you can click to select your audio device and microphone. you shouldn't have to restart zoom for this (but yes I have had this issue too although it seems to have gotten better).

another thing zoom does to me is mute my mic whenever i switch a session/join a breakout room, but there's an option to disable it controlling the mic in the zoom settings to fix that one

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