Since the whole COVID19 pandemic hoax started a couple of months ago, working from home has become the new hip thing every company brags about on every social media known to humankind.
The first step to be able to call yourself a proper COVID19 ready(tm) company is the ability to bother every employees with just a few mouse clicks.
So here we are, with Microsoft Teams(tm) and a lot of other not very secure and massively bloated software elected as the center of the office life.
Coffee break? XYZ software chatroom. Kick-off meeting? XYZ software chatroom. And so on.
Because of my special snowflake syndrome and my deep hatred for all things Microsoft and especially Windows I always end up making my life a bit harder.
After having used Teams in a Windows 10 VM (after all I paid for a license when I got my latest Thinkpad) for a few weeks, I decided it was time to finally try to make it work on my main OS: Fedora 31.
The catch was also that I wanted to do that more or less without installing any third party non free software.
The OS I use is Fedora 31, which comes with pipewire and xgd-desktop-portal both installed and configured out of the box.
Since using the official closed source Electron crapware client was out of the question, the obvious choice was to make Microsoft Teams work in a regular WEB browser.
The situation is the following:

  • Firefox ver. 75: latest stable release at the moment, MS Teams doesn’t like it at all, can’t even make regular calls, let alone sharing the screen.
  • chromium ver. 80.0.3987.163: included in Fedora’s update repository, regular calls work just fine but screen sharing is broken. No errors, no nothing, it just doesn’t do anything.
  • chromium-freeworld ver. 81.0.4044.92: rpfusion to the rescuse, this works like a charm. Both calls and screensharing, it even let the user pick which monitor he wants to share.

The steps to follow to have a fully working Microsoft Teams in Fedora with Wayland backend are:

  • make sure pipewire is running by typing in a shell: systemctl --user status pipewire.service
  • Make sure xdg-desktop-portal is installed by typing in a shell: sudo dnf list installed | grep xdg-desktop-portal
  • Install the proper version of Chromium by typing in a shell: sudo dnf install chromium-freeworld
  • Open Chromium, go to chrome://flags and enable WebRTC PipeWire support. Restart the browser to apply the changes.
  • Open https://teams.microsoft.com and enjoy the botnet from a non botnet WEB client.

BIG SHOUTOUT to my friend Mattia who spent one hour from 6:30 pm to 7:30 pm debugging this trash with me.