Launch MS Edge on Linux, directly opening Progressive Web App

Question

The official Microsoft Teams client for Linux being in a constant downturn, it seems to have gone essentially unmainted, with a growing number of meetings simply not working for participants.

The web client in firefox and chromium remains problematic with respect to displaying foreign screen shares. Thus, I'm switching over to running MS Teams as progressive web app (PWA) in Microsoft Edge (stable, Linux x86_64, installed via RPM on Fedora 37), where all base functions work on Linux.

I was trivially able to "install" Teams as app from the Edge burger menu.

However,

how do I launch msedge to directly open the PWA? I don't want to have to go through the menu to open the teams in a new window. I use Edge for literally nothing else.

score 6 · Accepted Answer · edited Dec 17 '22 at 03:47

Once you've got the Microsoft Teams PWA installed, you might be able to ask it to create a desktop shortcut.

Go through the … menu -> "Apps" -> "Manage Apps"; and in the edge://apps tab that opens, on the Teams PWA, go the … menu,

select "Create shortcut…", and there, select only pinning to "Desktop"

Afterwards, you will find a file in your Desktop directory (and if you're like many users that don't use a window manager with an MS Windows-Style desktop directory, you can cd "$(xdg-user-dir DESKTOP)").

That directory contains a freshly created file mstedge-${app_id}-Default.desktop, where ${app_id} is a random-looking alphabetic string.

Looking at its content,

#!/usr/bin/env xdg-open
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Name=Microsoft Teams
Exec=/opt/microsoft/msedge/microsoft-edge --profile-directory=Default --app-id=cifhbcnohmdccbgoicgdjpfamggdegmo "--app-url=https://teams.microsoft.com/?clientType=pwa"
Icon=msedge-cifhbcnohmdccbgoicgdjpfamggdegmo-Default
StartupWMClass=crx__cifhbcnohmdccbgoicgdjpfamggdegmo

The Exec line is what you're looking for!

/opt/microsoft/msedge/microsoft-edge \
    --profile-directory=Default \
    --app-id=cifhbcnohmdccbgoicgdjpfamggdegmo \
   "--app-url=https://teams.microsoft.com/?clientType=pwa"

On Windows, the equivalent you get is

msedge_proxy.exe --app-id=[long unique id] --app-url=https://teams.microsoft.com/

You can also install that to be included in your start menu; give it a category:

echo 'Categories=Network,VideoConference' >> msedge-cifhbcnohmdccbgoicgdjpfamggdegmo-Default.desktop

Afterwards, it can be established as menu entry:

xdg-desktop-menu install msedge-cifhbcnohmdccbgoicgdjpfamggdegmo-Default.desktop

Launch MS Edge on Linux, directly opening Progressive Web App

1 Answers1