Hi, Debian user here, and a paying zoom customer.
Now this is a bit frustrating aggravating. For close to 6 months, I’ve been the victim of my computer’s internal turmoil that has had a ripple effect to various parts of the OS and to hardware interfaces as well. In my case, randomly affecting the keyboard input to random apps to the point there is a 20+ second delay from pushing a key to it getting registered in the app, the only fix being to force close the app and restart it.
This has been a cause of much frustration and yelling for too long, forcing me to lose work, and then waste time yet again trying to research the cause, as well as waste time coming up with workarounds such as constantly copying data to a second application as backup. It’s most frustrating when it happens to Firefox, sometimes not for several days, by which time I can have several windows and over 100 tabs open for all kinds of projects I’m working on. I’ve had to add various kinds of session/tab savers to mitigate the side effects but they are not perfect and i often lose several dozen tabs still in the process.
Because this bug affects so many parts of the system besides zoom, it’s taken me months and countless hours to finally track it back to zoom. What I’ve found however, is this issue has been reported for a long time now:
- since at least April 2020. Thanks @ehashman I still run your script before every zoom update.
- again in July 2021. Thanks Ahmad.
- again in April 2022. Thanks @gunnarhj, you’ve been stellar. Thanks @osamu.aoki. Thanks @eberhard_beilharz. Thanks @msangel. Thanks @mpa. Thanks @donte.zoom at least you tried.
- again in June 2022. Thanks @rxtx. Thanks football. Thanks merecat.
- again in October 2022. Thanks @craig100.
Others have called this “rude engineering”. To see senior developers of an entire operating system have to get involved, only to see their requests to follow their policies thrown back at them, is unacceptable. Others have called it “the height of arrogance”.
To add even more insult to these injuries, this isn’t even a real “bug” that requires using brain power, debuggers, & tracers in order for code to be tracked down, re-written, re-tested, re-deployed, and so on, it’s merely a clerical error, miscategorizing a package as a dependent requirement, when it should be “suggested” (but could be “recommended”). I also noted that some distributions have repackaged Zoom’s release, changing the classification of the IBus integration, such this Arch Linux version, in which it’s “optional”.
Well, I ∗am∗ a paying customer, so to speak, one of thousands of clients on a multi-year enterprise license, no less. We have numerous licenses across Zoom’s full spectrum of products, including the phones.
This post is informational, to summarize and showcase this disaster that has literally wasted countless hours of my time and thousands of taxpayer’s dollars (which includes Zoom employees). I’d like to thank all those before me who tried to budge the behemoth just a hair but could not, for helping lead me here and finally finding a workaround, I’ve had no further issues since implementing Hashman’s pre-installation script and uninstalling ibus.
To all the victims of this senseless error, I got you 
building some comradery yeah. Now that I got the facts and my thoughts in order, my report to our Service Owner and Division Buyer within our Chief Information Office will soon follow, who will then be reaching out directly to our account managers. No need to deal with stinky forums at this service level 