What is it and why do we need/want it?
What value does it add to Solus?

Tons of alternative out here, clearly nothing special except some companies ask explicitly for it. I thought that a larger choice of packages was a good thing for Solus.

In T6#99, @Paradoxeuh wrote:

Tons of alternative out here, clearly nothing special except some companies ask explicitly for it. I thought that a larger choice of packages was a good thing for Solus.

Quality over quantity, as they say.

If there was a big enough request among the Solus users, then it would make sense to add it or if Zoom was widely popular.

If enough users +1 this with Tokens then yeah we could think about it. And @WonderingDane hit the nail on the head there

Late to the party here I suppose, but I would have +1'd this. My company does require it for our group audio/video calls and it's the only thing I'd need to use Solus 100% for work. But I also completely understand the dialog and logic above that resulted in closing this.

+1

My employer also requires us to use Zoom.

For the folks who need to run Zoom for work, it turns out to not be hard at all to install locally in Solus.

I've setup a simple Gist that I hope might help. As far as I can tell, all the dependencies needed come "out of the box" in Solus for Zoom. Though having another set of eyes try it out would be great. I'm personally excited, because now I can do everything I need to on Solus :)

https://gist.github.com/mcritchlow/61aeb06eae42cfe3125a949230c0e983

My company switched from GoToMeeting to Zoom and thus it's required for me. Sure would be nice to have it in the repos.

@sixtyfive I think you're kinda reading what you want from this. It was initially closed because nobody was interested, read back.

I do tend to do that, yeah. More matter-of-factly: how do things get into the thirdparty repository? Are they just ordinary packages that are stored in a different place from the main repository?

With the recent inclusion of snapcraft in Solus (yay) I've messaged Zoom requesting that they package the app up as a snap. I really think it would make their lives much easier, and ours as end users. Couldn't hurt for others to bother them as well if you agree. The response I got was positive, and they've added it to their feature request list.

Not that I'm against the current request of 3rd-party packaging of zoom, but snaps are now an alternative to potentially explore.

Yeah +1'ing the Snap approach. Relieves pressure from all of us. Well done @mcritchlow for the initiative to reach out to them.

I think we could have some kind of pending-snap outreach effort where we snappify existing things to show they work (but initially just as deb conversion dumps) to kickstart the initial process - and maybe talk to the Snapcraft guys about this.
I'll prod them tomorrow and see if we can set something up. Let's light a fire under this third party problem and solve it for everyone.

That's awesome, thanks @ikey !

So I got another update from Zoom customer service today. Not necessarily one that makes me feel much better, but sharing here nevertheless. So they're open to it, but use fpm for their builds now.

So fpm is going to need snap support for it to be worth it for them. Unless they can be convinced to package the snap directly, which I've encouraged them to consider..

Hello Matt,

Just wanted to give you a quick update on your Snapcraft request. We currently use fpm to generate the various formats for packaging. Right now there looks to be a request on GitHub for snap support once that goes through we should be able to offer this for you.

https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm/issues/1181

That's a little sad, looking at the fpm project on GitHub (410 open issues, 42 open PRs). Apparently the request for Snap was made by His Shuttleworthness Himself a long time ago and there's also an ongoing situation regarding how to move forward. Perhaps if you point these two things out to the Zoom customer service person, they might forward the issue to an engineer?

@sixtyfive - yep, I agree and that's essentially how I responded. I will say Zoom's customer service has been surprisingly great. So like I said, I think if others hit them up with the same request it seems reasonably likely to get some traction.

Done, @mcritchlow! Let's hope you're right ;-)

Edit 1 (August 19):

Thanks for the feedback. This is a good feature request. We have added this to our feature request list. Please follow us at http://blog.zoom.us for new product and feature announcements.

Sounds like corporate text modules to me, but we'll see...

Edit 2 (August 21):

I just got another message from one of the "support leads" at Zoom, and that one sounds real good and convinces me that indeed they now have native Snap package generation (not via FPM) in their internal issue tracker. I was also recommended to subscribe to updates to the Linux client at https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/205759689 (button labelled "Follow" in the upper right corner).

It would probably still be good if more people followed @mcritchlow and also wrote about this to the Zoom support folk.

In T6#76513, @sixtyfive wrote:

Done, @mcritchlow! Let's hope you're right ;-)

Edit 1 (August 19):

Thanks for the feedback. This is a good feature request. We have added this to our feature request list. Please follow us at http://blog.zoom.us for new product and feature announcements.

Sounds like corporate text modules to me, but we'll see...

Edit 2 (August 21):

I just got another message from one of the "support leads" at Zoom, and that one sounds real good and convinces me that indeed they now have native Snap package generation (not via FPM) in their internal issue tracker. I was also recommended to subscribe to updates to the Linux client at https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/205759689 (button labelled "Follow" in the upper right corner).

It would probably still be good if more people followed @mcritchlow and also wrote about this to the Zoom support folk.

That's great to hear! Thanks for the update @sixtyfive

I recently started using Zoom due to requests from other members of a community that need to frequently meet online. I'd love for this to be available as a snap, and I'll consider mentioning it to Zoom support, as well. It's been workable on Solus for me via the installation guide from @mcritchlow (thanks!) although it throws up a few errors for me in the terminal window. A supported snap would be preferable in terms of keeping the app stable and current.

In T6#94329, @greenwapiti wrote:

I recently started using Zoom due to requests from other members of a community that need to frequently meet online. I'd love for this to be available as a snap, and I'll consider mentioning it to Zoom support, as well. It's been workable on Solus for me via the installation guide from @mcritchlow (thanks!) although it throws up a few errors for me in the terminal window. A supported snap would be preferable in terms of keeping the app stable and current.

Glad the gist worked for you! Please do take the few minutes to email Zoom support directly and ask them to create a snap. The only way this will get high enough on their TODO list is if enough people ask for it.

@mcritchlow, in the meantime, perhaps you wanna share that Gist here? (I've already got it installed, and obviously @greenwapiti has, too, but maybe others would be happy about finding it when googling.)

@sixtyfive -- It's up a bit further in the thread of this ticket. I should probably take a look and see if anything needs tweaking..

@mcritchlow's Gist is at https://gist.github.com/mcritchlow/61aeb06eae42cfe3125a949230c0e983 in case anyone else isn't finding it because of older comments being hidden.

I just installed the new Flatpak version of Zoom on Solus and it works great, FYI.

+1

I don't like this software, but I have to use it and would be glad to find it in the Third Party repository

I wrote this shell script as an alternative to the Gist provided above:

$ ./install_zoom.sh

It will ask for sudo password at the end of the install, everything else is automated.

It looks like since this has been closed a Flatpak has been added for it on Flathub https://flathub.org/apps/details/us.zoom.Zoom . Though it isn't directly supported by Zoom themselves, it is definitely functional.

Especially considering the current situation with COVID-19 Zoom would be an essential addition to the 3rd party repo for a lot of general users.