Microsoft’s Slack competitor lands on Linux

Available now — Microsoft Teams, the company’s Slack competitor, just arrived on Linux. According to the company's blog post, fans of enterprise chats apps can download Teams as part of a public preview right away as .deb and .rpm installers.

A bit of a surprise — Long-time users of computers might raise an eyebrow at Microsoft publishing an Office app — ostensibly the company’s productivity crown jewels — on Linux. After all, Windows and Linux people spent much of the 90s and early 2000s in some kind of desktop computing culture war. Please see the visual artifacts below.

As fun as it may be to reminisce over whatever that was about, these days Microsoft is way more into making money, so instead of striving for desktop publishing supremacy it’s content to have its apps wherever its users are, like Mac, iOS, and Android. On its blog the company says:

“Most of our customers have devices running on a variety of different platforms such as Windows 10, Linux and others. We are committed to supporting mixed environments across our cloud and productivity offerings, and with this announcement, we are pleased to extend the Teams experience to Linux users.”