Skype worked far, far better 10 years ago than it does today. From all indications I've seen, Skype is getting dramatically worse all the time. From a personal standpoint, it crashes for me multiple times a day and I can rarely get group calls working on the first try. Often Skype requires a force-quit and then it crashes twice more when it is being restarted. This is on Mac and Android.
Fun fact: I have a friend who worked for Skype in Prague. He said the codebase is a true horror, an extreme mess, and that soon it would "reach a singularity" :-) He also said that there are whole parts of the codebase that he was not allowed to see, all indications pointing to stuff related to routing the traffic through servers of "the man" ;-)
Most things worked far, far better 10 years ago than today. Apparently this is progress.
Social everything means we can't visit a website today without calls to a billion external domains. Phones are doing the same as they're mini-tablets that suck at actual phone calls. Operating systems have taken on mobile centric (and the hideous flatten everything) design that is broken paradigm for a 15" laptop or 24" desktop screen. Firefox was a stripped down, light browser so it stayed fast - now they include more useless garbage than Netscape Communicator ever did. All that crap should be in official plugins so you add pocket only if you want it etc.
Nothing at all is user centric any more, it's all about how much lovely data can be sent back to hundreds of places.
The web is a lot prettier these days to be fair, but I don't call that progress if it's at a cost of a 1TB page load.
> Most things worked far, far better 10 years ago than today. Apparently this is progress.
Sigh. If you wanted to look up a business on your phone you'd have to call directory enquiries - did that "work better" than your smartphone? Did you prefer RealPlayer over HTML video? Was WAP better than LTE? Was Windows XP the pinnacle of OS design?
Yeah, sometimes progress is a double-edged sword that outdates some things we used to do. Yes, it's worth the price.
Having so many apps constantly spitting unnecessary data out to trackers and heaven knows what isn't better. Neither is simple apps that can't cope when you go out of data coverage, which seems to be becoming more common.
I'd rather have gnome 2 than 3, I'd rather have Win 7 than 10 or XP. I don't consider any of them the pinnacle of design, but I don't think they're currently moving in a helpful direction either. There's been precious little progress or innovation in the OS space for years.
I'd rather have google talk, which was small, light, minimal and crucially reliable over hangouts or current skype.
Just because software isn't moving in a way that you personally want doesn't mean it's wrong or that it was objectively "better" before.
We don't have apps that work offline? Maybe look around more. FFS half of the web apps i use work fine offline.
And claiming that there has been no innovation in the OS space for years is silly. There is plenty of innovation, it's just that people don't like change and will instantly reject something that isn't the same as what they are already using. FFS just look at stuff like the ip command or systemd in linux. People lament that it's the end of days because a command is different exactly because they want to innovate past the constraints of the old systems.
And if we are playing the "What i want is what is best" game...
I much prefer Windows 10 over linux now. It's gotten that nice and i'm tired of constantly fixing stuff on my workstation.
And I much prefer current hangouts to the old google talk plugin. "small", "light"? Did you ever use it. You needed to download and install 2 separate programs to get Google Talk video chat working. Sometimes you'd need to do some port forwarding bullshit just to get it to work.
Now i install chrome and sign in, and within a minute hangouts is installed and working.
> And I much prefer current hangouts to the old google talk plugin. "small", "light"? Did you ever use it. You needed to download and install 2 separate programs to get Google Talk video chat working. Sometimes you'd need to do some port forwarding bullshit just to get it to work.
I'm pretty sure the GP is referring to the native google talk client that gtalk was originally launched with. It was indeed a very simple jabber+sip client (by far the simplest of the major available clients) and had a tiny memory footprint. It did nothing but chat and voice calls.
And you needed to install that client, then install the video and voice chat plugin if you wanted that, then sign in to your account (and if you had 2 factor auth you needed to jump through some other hoops).
It just seems like people will rewrite history. It was cumbersome, had strange scaling issues on many of my PCs at the time, didn't work on macs, you needed to just do it yourself on linux (and i'm not even sure if videochat worked on linux...).
I still think you're talking about a different, later thing. The client I'm talking about had no plugins and didn't support video, but did support voip directly. It was actually a selling point at the time over MSNM/AIM, iirc. You're right it didn't work on macs, or linux for that matter, because it was a native windows program and they never released a client for any other platform and there was no web interface to it at the time (but you could use any xmpp client with it, as you still can).
I'm pretty sure it was also before google even had TFA.
Windows 10 is a pretty good OS but has serious issues with drivers (it tries to be clever and breaks stuff). And the startup is sooooo slow and the UI crashes twice before I ever get the chance to give it input.
The Mail, Calendar and OneNote apps kept me hooked. But the lack of a decent terminal was killing me. Also, Skype didn't work properly half the time and the new "Video" and "Messaging" apps built on top of Skype were crashing 90% of the time.
Windows 8 came preinstalled with the computer and then just updated to Windows 10 from it. If the main upgrade method is broken, I'm not sure what to believe anymore...
If Windows 8 came preinstalled, and you didn't wipe it and install from a clean ISO yourself, then you've got more crapware installed than you can shake a stick at, with hooks riddled all through your system. Doubtless, some of that vendor-supplied junkware is incompatible with Windows 10.
There's the occasional odd package under Linux which remains installed and you need to manually remove it, but nothing unfixable. But I guess that depends more on the underlying OS structure. I'm looking forward to see more widespread usage of Snappy Ubuntu.
Since that is the main way people migrate to Windows 10, I would've expected them to be more careful with it.
Many linux systems don't even support in-place upgrades between major versions. And I don't think i've ever had one work where nothing broke.
RHEL only started supporting it for the transition between 6 and 7 on a like 3 architectures on one edition.
And OSX has it's share of issues. For me personally, updating to El Capitan was the worst upgrade processes i've done in recent memory. From not running the installer but giving no issues, to not finding the harddrive during the install process, to corrupting the current install of yosemite, to bluetooth being broken after the upgrade, and i can't get wifi speeds over 1mbps.
A clean install solved all of that, but that's pretty normal with every single OS i've ever encountered.
It's not a question of being "more careful", it's that writing software in a way that it can be in-place upgraded to something you don't know will exist at the time is EXTREMELY HARD! I really feel it's one of the big "unsolved problems" in computer science and i don't see it being solved any time soon.
I agree with untog, you need to get your install fixed. I'm running on hardware from 2011(except the SSD) since launch and Windows 10 is extremely fast to boot and the UI hasn't crashed once. It even runs my security camera software that was last updated in 2008. I only recently re-installed Skype so I can't speak to that but it has problems all of it's own.
> There is plenty of innovation, it's just that people don't like change and will instantly reject something that isn't the same as what they are already using.
It's not change that people don't like, it's the mountains of randomly missing features, settings and control remotely subverted away from the system owner, tons of software no longer working, a terrible UI nobody asked for. Who wants 10 steps of innovation forward if it comes bundled with 1,000 undocumented steps backward?
The ip command is a monstrosity. It is basically trying to emulate Cisco's IOS in a command to placate those that want to use Linux as their router firmware.
compare something simple as enabling a network card using ifconfig vs using ip, as you can easily tell the difference. You end up 3 layers deep before you can even enter the card id you want to do anything with!
When seasoned kernel devs don't want to touch a tool, warning lights should come on.
When it's not something you want, it's to "Placate people". But if it was something you wanted, i'm sure it would be a welcome feature!
And it's not that complicated, just different.
Want a "traditional" list of interfaces? `ip addr`
Want to list running interfaces? `ip link ls up`
Want to set a device up/down? `ip link set dev {DEVICE} {up|down}`
Quick question! How do you set the MTU length in a legacy REHL system? Because with ip it's just `ip link set mtu 9000 dev eth0`!
Yeah, its new and will require some learning, but it's not inherently bad...
And talking about seasoned kernel devs, name one time that there wasn't a minority of kernel devs bitching about a new feature! Every change is going to make some people worse off.
"just". Ifconfig gets the job done, unless RH has been odd selves again...
As for devs, Torvalds didn't have much love for the ip command last time i looked into things. And a year or so back i ran into a Ts'o posting about his dislike for polkit (a close cousin of systemd).
> If you wanted to look up a business on your phone you'd have to call directory enquiries - did that "work better" than your smartphone?
Bad example. I didn't need a smartphone for this task because there was a real live human being, who brought to the task all of the adaptability and intuition that modern systems lack. I didn't need Yelp, or Google Maps, or even the entire name of the business I was looking for. "I need the number to the printing company on the east side" was enough to get me a name, an address, and the call routed, without paying monthly bandwidth fees or spending seven hundred dollars on a pocket supercomputer.
Realplayer sucked but it was about a thousand times more reliable than the current compatibility crapshoot (sans bandwidth issues).
Worth the price? Sure, but to quote Pulp Fictoin, let's not start beating each other off just yet. There is plenty of room for improvement, and we've lost a lot of ground.
I used to be able to take a supersonic flight across the country, without having my body inspected via millimeter-wave radar.
> I didn't need a smartphone for this task because there was a real live human being, who brought to the task all of the adaptability and intuition that modern systems lack.
OK, my example was simplistic. I want to find the best chicken tacos in San Francisco. I can't call directory enquiries for that - I have go find reviews. Then call to make a reservation at the place, then find driving directions of how to get there, somehow. In a paper road atlas? Am I having to advocate for the benefits of the internet on Hacker News?
> Realplayer sucked but it was about a thousand times more reliable than the current compatibility crapshoot
Well of course it was, it only had to run on one platform. Compatibility is a lot easier when that's the case. Today we have HD video being played on mobile devices in your pocket. I can't remember the last time I ran into a compatibility problem with online video.
> I used to be able to take a supersonic flight across the country, without having my body inspected via millimeter-wave radar.
That's a political decision, not a technical regression.
> Has anyone set foot on the moon in your lifetime?
No. Can I load, on demand, stunning satellite photography of planets orders of magnitude further away than the moon, on my phone, on the bus to work? You bet.
> That's a political decision, not a technical regression.
It's both. Private supersonic flights are no longer available, and it is more of a pain in the ass to get on the inferior flights that are available.
I could go on, but it's moot -- the only point I'm here to make is that progress always been paired with regression, and it's always going to be a personal decision as to whether the tradeoffs were good ones.
I call BS on the review side. Where is the 'best chicken tacos in San Francisco'?
I have no idea and Yelp is not going to help. So, the fallback is I can ask some friends for advice and directions or use some companies best of list. But, again the internet did almost nothing in this space.
Sorry, but I'd be surprised if Google or Siri don't answer your question to "I need the number to the printing company on the east side", it's a pretty trivial thing to lookup. Also, Google and Siri bring you cost efficiency and scale, something you can't easily do with directory enquiries.
> Realplayer sucked but it was about a thousand times more reliable than the current compatibility crapshoot.
So Vorbis/MP3 and WebM/H.264 is not good enough for compatibility over all the browsers?
They might have been better at the small subset of things Windows and Ubuntu can do that the Amiga and ST were also capable of, but they are not "better".
A single screwdriver is better than a toolbox at being light and easy to carry. It is not better overall.
And I'll look you right back and call bullshit. I used an Amiga in the late eighties. It was a fantastic machine for its time, certainly more advanced than the contemporary 286 PCs, but Windows 95 was markedly superior (as it should have been, a decade later), let alone modern Windows or Linux.
Yes, sometimes things get screwed up and we get understandably frustrated, but that does not license revisionist history.
> we can't visit a website today without calls to a billion external domains
NoScript really brings this into visibility. I don't mind the domain running scripts. But the 10+ other domains that needs to run a script - sigh. My wife keeps asking my why I put up with it - it's quite simple; I decide if the page I'm about to visit is worth all the extra crap running and tracking me.
Personally I prefer uMatrix - it lets you enable specific things across domains instead of a binary allow/deny, and allows global versus per-domain or per-subdomain rules; e.g. I might be fine with one site collecting metrics but not globally.
In my observation, this has certainly been the trend.
In my experience, in this climate you have to look harder to find it user-focused software, and to some extent you have to write some of it yourself.
This is because the software world has been flooded with "easy to use" programs that are either located on third party computers or must automatically connect to third party computers in order to be useful.
To be truthful, I'm not sure that many users of today, i.e., younger ones, really understand what we mean by user-centric and user-focused. They may think if something is made "easy" for them, then it's user-focused.
But where computer software is involved, we've seen it is precisely the opposite. If users want more control then they have to endure a little inconvenience, at least in the short term.
The easier and more "frictionless" the software, the more the user should understand that the software has not been written so much for their benefit as for someone else's.
I found out more about "system" addons. There are different types of addons: app-profile, app-system-addons, app-system-defaults, app-global, app-system-local, app-system-share, app-system-user, app-temporary.
The "app-system-defaults" (in my case Pocket & Loop/Hello) don't seem to be shown to the user, but you can find them in the extensions.xpiState config.
>Most things worked far, far better 10 years ago than today. Apparently this is progress.
Not everything; cars today are a big improvement over cars 10 years ago, and especially cars 20 years ago. Just in the last 10 years, cars have made huge improvements in fuel economy alone. Cars have gotten really good for the most part. Some article I recently read on an auto blog, about the "10 worst" cars, even complained that modern cars are so great now that their picks were really just about which ones were the worst values relative to their competition, and that, unlike in past ages, they couldn't point to any true stinkers.
Also, I think mobile phone software is generally better now than 10 years ago. 10 years ago the iPhone was brand new, and most people still used crappy feature phones running things like BREW. They just didn't give you the capabilities that modern phones do. Some people complain that newer phones have poorer call quality than old flip-phones, but personally talking on the phone is one of the least-used features. I spend a lot more time using it for texting, photos, voice mail, and various apps (taking notes, calculator, playing games, Tinder, etc.).
However, in the software world, I will readily agree that most PC-based software was far, far better 10 years ago than today. PC-based software in the last 5 years has really, really gone down the toilet. Windows 8/10 are a prime example here, but even Linux distros really aren't doing that great either. The web is a horror show, with every site full of dozens of JavaScript scripts running, mainly for spying/tracking purposes. I don't even agree that the web is prettier; too many sites are mobile-centric, and look stupid on a regular PC screen.
Are you kidding? Automatic seatbelts are incredibly stupid, and are provably bad. The only reason they were invented was because the federal government required cars to have "passive safety devices" installed, and they were aiming for airbags. But lots of shitty car companies like Saturn were too cheap to install airbags so they installed mousebelts instead.
The whole problem with them is that they're dangerous as hell, and offer zero benefit, and only drawbacks.
They're dangerous because they encourage people, by supposedly being "automatic", to not buckle up. They're not effective if you don't buckle the lap belt, but during that time lots of people didn't, because they thought it wasn't necessary. After all, what's the point of an "automatic seatbelt" if you still have to manually buckle part of it?
So, if you're going to go to the trouble of buckling the lap belt to get full effectiveness, what exactly is the benefit over having a normal 3-point belt? There is none.
Finally, the belts were a total hindrance if you got in your car with anything in your hands, such as a briefcase or purse or bag. Anyone driving alone (as most of the population does most of the time) and carrying something frequently just jumps in the front seat holding the bag, and puts it in the passenger seat or floor. With the mousebelt in the way, this became a good way to get tangled up.
If you're still driving that piece of shit, do yourself a favor and get a newer car. That thing has no airbags and has terrible crashworthiness compared to anything newer than 25 years old. You're very likely to die in a crash in that car, which in a new car you would walk away from.
>Firefox was a stripped down, light browser so it stayed fast - now they include more useless garbage than Netscape Communicator ever did.
Sorry, I don't think Pocket and Hello surpasses the junk bundled with Communicator, which came with a custom mail client. Mozilla's mail client is not only not installed with Firefox, but it's also pretty much dead now, in fact.
Email was the only other useful part. Thunderbird is not exactly dead, just forgotten. I still run it, since I de-googled, though sadly it's also turning into bloatware.
Netscape had a chat thing, html publisher, and I think something else.
WebRTC, pocket, the webIDE, even things like the dom inspector, style editor etc and pdf are bloat for most mortals. Perfect for some "official" plugins. They managed it for the FF OS simulator.
It's all optional crap that increases bloat and attack surface, except it's not optional.
Why is WebRTC bloat? A lot of people us it for video calls nowadays. Pocket is a neat solution for avoiding having lots of tabs eating your memory, which in turn ends up causing page swapping and messing with your experience.
"pdf are bloat for most mortals"
That's alright, it means in 99% cases it's just a very small javascript file on your disk. No harm done.
Bloat is relative and subjective. I've never used WebRTC, Pocket, or Loop/Hello, so I'd consider them bloat. On the other hand, I need to deal with PDFs fairly frequently, so it's convenient to have a browser that supports them. Someone else is going to have different requirements. I don't have a problem with that, but I'd prefer to have an option to disable or remove the features that I don't need or want.
I'd say the situation now is about the same as it was then. Only the context has changed. Communicator had a mail client and a news client. I used them both over dial-up, back in the day. If enough people still wanted newsreaders, you can bet Mozilla would write one.
I used Thunderbird daily for the better part of a decade until about 3 months ago. It's nothing personal against the project, which is currently the best serious desktop mail client available afaik. It's simply that Mozilla doesn't care about it anymore since everyone uses webmail now. Thunderbird is doing feature releases about once a year now [0], and Mozilla has pulled most (all?) of its full-time developers [1]. A few months ago, Mitchell Baker sent a message that said they were looking to detach Mozilla from the project completely, partially because it didn't have enough industry-wide impact to be worth Mozilla's resources [2].
The sad fact is that desktop mail clients are going away, and even the big projects like Thunderbird are barely limping along, which I guess is slightly nicer terminology than "pretty much dead"?
What makes an email client so difficult to write? I don't mean this to sound insulting, I just really don't understand where the complexity is. It seems like you should be able to get to a point where it is feature complete and all development efforts shift to maintenance mode. Or maybe I don't understand what's been going on with Thunderbird and perhaps it's been "done" for years now.
It is basically done. There could be UI refinements and updates to the occasional protocol/security change, but yeah, there's not been much innovation in email standards for a while.
Although, to be honest, email standards are a complete mess in some regards and I suppose this make such an endeavour not as trivial as it looks on first sight.
Just an example: try to create (and use) an IDN-based email address with non-ASCII characters in the local part. You will be amazed how incompatible on so many layers this actually is. I can hardly imagine there weren't dozens of similarly tricky situations where the developers of this, or any other email client for that matter, were forced to make quite serious design choices because of either ambiguity in standards, or widespread lack of support thereof.
I don't like the fact that it uses an external API. I don't like a third party (other than my mail host) to have access to my email password and messages.
Thanks. It wasn't meant to be sarcastic although it surely looks like it when I read it now. I was genuinely interested to find out about it since it's a program I rely on and if it won't be developed further, I'll have to look for alternatives.
As the responses in this thread demonstrate, there's plenty of cause for both pessimism and optimism. So let's all choose to be optimists, then get on with improving our own little piece of the world.
>Fun fact: I have a friend who worked for Skype in Prague. He said the codebase is a true horror, an extreme mess, and that soon it would "reach a singularity"
Being a developer, I read this and think, what developer thinks any existing codebase is NOT a mess. It's the number one developer complaint ever. They (we?) all think we know a better way.
I've worked on plenty of good codebases. I think the key is continuous improvement. The code from 5 years ago is always going to be worse than today's code, but as long as you're able to improve code as you work on it it doesn't get too bad.
Once when I was interviewing for a job, I was given and offer and I accepted it conditionally. I asked to sit with a senior developer for 30 minutes and browse the code. Turns out it was in great shape and the person that gave me the walkthrough was one of the greatest programmers I've ever had the pleasure to work with.
No. This company's main product (the one I would be working on) had been around for a long time so I was concerned about what kind of shape the code was in.
A lot of the codebase at Google is pretty darn good. Certainly nowhere close to approaching a technical debt singularity where further progress becomes impossible.
There is a difference between bad code you write today and make better tomorrow and code so bad that it takes you days to even understand it properly that making changes become very difficult and usually always breaks existing functionality.
Yeah, I agree. It's a really common excuse and I think it somewhat diminishes the credibility of those who use it. I don't think anyone's opinion on what constitutes a "truly horrible codebase" should count until they've been a developer for at least 10 years, worked at several different employers, and contributed to several different large open-source projects (which usually have the luxury of rejecting code until they feel it's "right" despite the potential commercial consequences, not something that most other projects get to do). "This codebase is terrible" is a common whine from newer devs and/or people that are just too lazy to put in the time to learn someone else's code.
In the real world, production projects get messy because getting stuff done is more important than building a codebase that represents the paragon of academic excellence. That doesn't automatically make the project horrible.
In my experience it mostly just boils down to having the right processes and being strongly motivated to do things right rather than push things out the door as quickly as possible. Assuming superiors have your back, this is doable. It's when they don't or when the developers lose or completely lack motivation that things start to fall apart.
Lack of motivation often means lack of process, lack of process often means lack of testing and maintenance, lack of testing and maintenance often means lack of quality. It's a vicious cycle too - once you start down the road it's harder and harder to get motivated about your product again.
Honestly, the only reason the codebase isn't a mess is its a single project I've been able to tightly control and enforce things on [because its 100% my problem if something goes wrong].
As someone who has seen several LARGE commercial software projects, there is a definite gradation from "it's hard to comprehend these layers of abstraction, but after a few days I kind of understand how they interact" to
// X - uncommented on 1.2.03 to fix bug
// Y - commented again on 3.2.03 because it broke stuff
// if (condition)
{
... logic here, half of it commented out ...
}
Of the same opinion, there is sort-of the architecture "mess" where it is complicated and you may just have to spend some time learning and/or see some hiccups because large projects are complicated and then there is the 15 year old code base where _everything_ feels hacked/tacked on.
Not to mention Google Talk was a chat system first and foremost.
Hangouts is a funnel to get you to use their browser (still don't understand why it ships as a plugin) and social network first, chat application second.
I always assumed it was because it would be cross-platform by default. Making native apps for Hangouts on Windows, OS X and Linux would be pretty time consuming.
Also not sure what you mean by "social network", it looks a lot like a chat app to me.
I guess "Internet telephone" is still an unsolved problem silly smile
I've setup asterisk as a personal SIP/voip server and it works pretty good. You can even hook it up to a provider that lets you out on the telephone network. And SIP is built into many hardware phones already.
Every few years I make an attempt to get into SIP/voip, but so far my experience has always been the same: Wall-of-text like documentation that makes no sense, huge cryptic config files, tutorials that assume you already know everything or that just don't work, software that only works with such-and-such kernel, conflicting information scattered across the globe. It feels like trying to set up Slackware in the early 90s. After a few hours I get tired and drop it again.
Like most free software I had to find information here and there and do some trail and error. But it was a way better experience then for example compiling something (with deprecated dependencies). I really love apt-get!
After using Hangouts for years now, I've become sick and tired of it, and have finally found an alternative. Unfortunately, this is only for the text/image chat functionality, but it's a very good replacement:
https://telegram.org/
It was on the front page of Hacker News just a couple of days ago, and that's where I found out about it. Much nicer clients, open protocol (so you can even make your own clients), reliable, and many more features than Hangouts make this a much better alternative.
For voice and video, however, I haven't found a good alternative that is easily accessible to people that don't want to set things up on their computer. Hangouts will just randomly not work for me, depending entirely on random chance, and I still can't find anything more convenient than it.
I like Zoom (http://zoom.us/). I used to use Hangouts, but it consumed a lot of CPU. The free Zoom account allows you to have up to fifty people in a room for forty minutes, or an unlimited length call with just two participants.
I've used zoom.us quite a bit and was family impressed. There's also appear.in which is not as good, but doesn't have all the restrictions the free zoom.us tier has.
I just encountered Zoom this week! I had a conference with a German (I'm in Vietnam at the moment) and she sent me a link to it. I'd never heard of it and was a bit frustrated to need to install another plugin.
But it was a great experience compared to Hangouts! The connection quality was on par with Skype and it was super light-weight for something based in the browser.
I hope the next step is a sane API to let third-party clients integrate with it. It does not have to be XMPP, as long as it's something clear and well-supported.
I wouldn't thrust Google for a second. They are not afraid to close down services with a short notice - so unless I can run my own "Hangouts" backbone it means nothing to me.
Sorry, not sure how much I can say in public. (There's lots of stuff that's public, but I can't just do a knowledge dump, because it's not clearly separated in my mind.)
you know, i stopped using hangouts not long ago. my mobile internet is sometimes really flaky and about 3 month ago messages didn't show up anymore after sending them. just nothing in the history for hours.
eventually (up to 8 hours later) they did show up, mostly at the correct time as well, but that wasnt good enough for me.
Skype used to be great, but started to downspiral fast as soon as it was acquired by MS. Before that, Skype was running on all my devices 24/7, but then (after MS acquisition) it started taking way too much resources and crashing constantly what resulted that I barely use Skype anymore, only turn it on when I have to make/receive an international call that was planned in advance. Not to mention forced updates (that resets all user settings and restore defaults from time to time), horrible UI that reminds more of an ancient Yahoo front page than a chat app and all this surveillance mess.
IMO Skype was pretty bad before MS but only in that the messages wouldn't always synchronize or get delivered between computers so conversations were very difficult but if the client was at least okay.
When MS bought it everything went to shit. Still had the problems with messaging/sync but if you had a surface pro it'd be impossible to send files or share contacts on the preinstalled metro app which IMO is a pretty fucking basic feature. Worse yet it prevented you from being able to install the regular desktop client and the Android version couldn't start group calls so I had to use two fucking computers just to use it like before.
And the stupid notifications will pull you out of a game too because for some reason they're still clickable when you're full screen.
They can't even do IAP right. Yesterday I wanted to call my mum, so first I struggled to sign in since asking to reset my password they somehow cloned my account into some Microsoft/Live ID thing, and then when I bought the Skype credit they flagged it as fraud because... I have 2 Skype accounts, and refunded the money.
It is so bad that I literally cannot even give them my money.
In the past year, the Mac client has also become very fragile. If I quit the Skype App without signing out, next time login keeps failing unless I go to the library folder and delete my Skype user profile directory. Quite shameful for such a high profile software.
Err, if anything the OSX versions of MS software is more stable than the Windows versions. MS is big on eating its own dogfood so anything new is built on the newest technologies, so we get a lot of .NET stuff using the newest version of the framework that the devs don't have a lot of experience with just yet and other Microsoftisms that just end up causing issues (most recent libraries and APIs, integration with the registry, integration with AD/GPO, IE/Trident integration, random Windows Update patches get installed in the background, etc).
I just tried installing the Azure backup agent and after an hour of futzing with it, I just gave up. It installed like four different pre-requisites and forced Windows Update to run and install stuff without my permission. Still won't work and gives an ambigious error message that even google can't help. I never see this like this with MS on other platforms.
On other platforms the development is simpler and using more mature technology because there's no real benefit or pressure to dogfood.
I agree with you. This is textbook Microsoft. They're also implementing Windows-only features in Minecraft and it wouldn't surprise me if the desktop client begins to suddenly degrade on non-MS platforms at some point.
It is ironic considering the whole windows phone community is lamenting all the time against microsoft because all their apps are of far better quality on ios and android than on wp.
Strange, considering that Skype on OS X / iOS was (still is?) better - ie pasting links would generate a thumbnail in messaging, Windows got this only recently. Also OS X client didn't had that annoying 'unread' bug. So.
I do have my suspicions that no one really cares about Linux on desktop and 99% people would agree, that even having a Linux client is a waste of time, and posts like yours are nothing but linux zealotry - "boo M$ antitrust making me use Windblows"...
Also it doesn't support logging in with Facebook accounts.
Edit: why the downvotes? It's a feature finely supported on desktop clients, and it does not work on Android - so in order to use Android Skype, I'd have to create a "pure" Skype account (with its own password!), and re-import all my contacts.
For me, that's a bug that has seen no activity for over 3 years.
Best feature is when the wifi drops out it gets unresponsive and you need to kill the app, re-log and redial to get back to were you were. Even WeChat handles that gracefully on my phone.
I compared by running the client on OS X, Win10 and Android in the same time. OS X and Win10 clients seemed to pretty much agree on availability status and to be correct.
But on Android, contacts that are yellow (away) show often as green (available).
Worse, sometimes those who are present show as being offline.
I feel like it has improved because it used to just lock up in the background with the indicator still claiming everything was fine and you're available. And then when you actually check in on it by opening the app it'd show you've been disconnected the entire time and quickly log on to be able to pretend nothing ever happened.
Nowadays while it's still occasionally disconnecting at random at least the indicator seems to be more honest about what's going on I would like to believe it locks up less frequently.
From what I remember, it might have to do with the fact that they had to refactor the whole thing to not rely on P2P, which was its original model, since the rise of smartphones and unstable mobile networking? I think it now runs similarly to Hangouts - out of datacenters.
Don't bring facts to the piss on Skype party... This is 100% true. I worked at a state university. If someone was running Skype, because of the algorithm for determining such things, our users all became supernodes on the Skype P2P network which pummeled the network.
They eventually banned Skype on any machine connected to the network with prejudice. This impacted international research projects as Skype had been saving a ton of international comm. money to that point.
And, as usual, those who have a gripe are loud. I use Skype every day and I am never able to feign like I don't get messages from people. It never drops and it hits three devices at once. My digital leash serves its masters just fine...
And when someone tries to innovate in this live group chat space, they get bought out[0]. I doubt we'll see the features of Talko in Skyp any time soon, and I expect whatever creative buzz they had going over at Talko will surely be killed by the forced reintegration into the Microsoft bureaucracy.
They /let themselves be bought out/; big difference there. If their ideology was to create a proper Skype competitor, they wouldn't go for the 'quick buck' / become millionaires overnight.
This was a bit of an "existential" question for me over the past years. I've been wondering if it was just me doing something I shouldn't be doing or if Skype was really going that bad, specially on Android. "It's not possible, they have a successful product. They wouldn't fuck it up. Has to be me...". I kind of kept creating excuses for it when it wasn't working: "Skype looks pretty heavy, I don't know if I should expect it to run smoothly on my phone..." or even blame the phones themselves (which have always been on the flagship side for the time).
But in this day and age, bad performance of apps are kind of "unacceptable". If it doesn't work right, something else will, and I'll have no problems abandoning the bad product. And guess what: Skype is shitty. I often get message notifications on my phone hours after they arrived on my desktop (that is, if I get a notification at all). It's slow and clunky and a pain to even start a call. I dread the thought of having to use it on my phone. I've asked to delay meetings so I could take them from my computer. Or even spend money on Google Voice and make that international call through the regular phone app. So, I abandoned it. I don't suggest Skype anymore to my contacts when I have a call. You know, "Ok, so I'll call you at 9am. Skype's good?". Not anymore. It's usually Hangouts.
The only time Skype worked for me was on a Nokia N800. It actually worked so well that it delayed my mobile phone adoption for a year. It just worked. Enter this decade where I think I paid for a subscription for almost 4 years and maybe got one or two good calls on other devices during the whole stint.
Messaging systems seemed to work so much better last decade when they were still P2P. I maintained real relationships on them as opposed to no one ever being online on Skype and the shame that is Facebook.
Which is ironic, because the whole point of moving Skype from the un-interceptable P2P infrastructure to a centralized/interceptable one was to "make Skype work better".
> Skype worked far, far better 10 years ago than it does today. From all indications I've seen, Skype is getting dramatically worse all the time.
Yeah, I suspect it was originally written by people who knew what they were doing and now it has gone through years bottom-dollar maintenance to cut engineering costs.
Stop using Skype. The NSA allegedly collects all Skype traffic anyways. Do you really want that?
"The full capture of voice traffic began in February of 2011 for “Skype in” and “Skype out” calls—calls between a Skype user and a land line or cellphone through a gateway to the public switched telephone network (PSTN), captured through warranted taps into Microsoft’s gateways. But in July of 2011, the NSA added the capability of capturing peer-to-peer Skype communications—meaning that the NSA gained the ability to capture peer-to-peer traffic and decrypt it using keys provided by Microsoft through the PRISM warrant request."
I've given up on the NSA not reading my stuff. The NSA collects pretty much anything they can get their hands on. It's a losing battle. If there's something I don't want the NSA to know about, I use Tails.
>If there's something I don't want the NSA to know about, I use Tails.
This is a nice thought, but probably not realistic for a variety of reasons. Perhaps most relevantly, I would expect that a large quantity of major Tor exit nodes are tapped by the NSA.
I would also expect that most servers you talk to are either already tapped by NSA in one way or another or can be tapped by the NSA trivially if they decide they want to see what's happening.
Tor is vulnerable to adversaries that monitor Tor exit nodes. But this assumes for such adversaries to also control the destination service.
The attack is effective if the adversary is setting up its own fake websites and then luring users in (with child porn, etc.), correlating their traffic. But for hot services, like Gmail, even if the NSA has the potential to track Gmail's traffic, the noise and the false positives are too great.
And for services outside of the US jurisdiction, the NSA isn't able to legally coerce companies into giving them the keys needed for mass surveillance. Sure, they can reach agreements with local intelligence agencies for wiretapping and exchanging of information, but it would be an international disaster if it got out that foreign companies were forced through legal means by an US agency to hand over control. And this extends somewhat even to US-hosted servers of foreign companies. Yes they have physical access to US-based servers, no, it's not necessarily easy for them.
What this means is that the NSA is not able to control and measure many popular Internet services. It's also all a matter of cost. Raise the cost significantly and it will get too expensive to do mass-surveillance, even for the NSA.
Of course, if they target you directly, then all bets are off. Though in such a case they can just wiretap your home and office and hear everything you do or speak. But in the meantime if I use apps like Signal for communications, or PGP for my very private email, or SSL for connecting to my web server, I can be sure that the NSA is not tracking me because I'm not a target, I'm not a US citizen, I'm not interesting and it's probably expensive for them to track me through those channels.
Of course the NSA can read your stuff. The question is, will NSA be able to read your stuff /without you being specifically targeted/. There is a MASSIVE difference between getting caught in the global dragnet and being specifically targeted with nation-state malware and hardware hacks.
Don't expect that just because you are using PGP for email or OTR that NSA can't read your shit if they put their mind to it - but it's extremely unlikely that they will, and nothing would protect against it. It's a noble cause to use encryption, to stop yourself from intentionally giving data to anyone with a promiscuous WiFi card and broadcasting "please steal this" to anyone that can. You are choosing to give the NSA all your data.
Using an encrypted alternative to Skype also prevents Microsoft from Big Brother-ing you, too. It's not just the NSA, but Microsoft selling personal information to advertisers or collecting analytic data that you have every right not to provide.
I've actually had skype deployed in multiple locations as a way to do super cheap monitoring solution.
1) old laptops from ebay(probably paid $100 for each)
2) microsoft 3000 webcam
3) linux.
Each laptop was configured with its own skype account, would start it on boot, audio out completely disabled, and set to pick up calls from friends automatically.
Why not use a regular CCTV solution?
I knew I could call that skype client from anywhere in the world, even from my phone, and I would get very good quality sound and video. I've had "networked" CCTV cameras which were $1000+ and they had choppy video and barely audible audio, plus you had to do some sort of dyndns solution to access them everywhere.
What kind of monitoring are you talking about, if I may?
That solution, unless you haven't told the whole story, doens't record anything, so unless I'm watching closely just when they're robbing my hose it will be all for naught.
> Yes, there are far better alternatives out there, so if we could stop using skype and switch to something else, would be a great move here.
What? There are secure text-only clients, but voice/video/group video? Where is the more secure version of those? Or is this going to go down the road of "set up your own VoIP service" again?
People always say there are tons of alternatives to Skype... Where are these alternatives and why aren't they popular?
Indeed I originally used it because it was cross platform, buy in meant relatives are now trained and comfortable with it. Personally I like HTTPS://appear.in for voice chat but one needs the phonebook, voicemail, online-indicator and such parts for it all to work efficiently.
I've been educating as many people (especially Management and Business people) as I can to switch over from Skype to any other alternative (like Hangouts). Because Skype is:
* A memory hog
* A bandwidth hog (its really inefficient about network usage, and uses a lot of bandwidth even when idle)
* Has much lower call quality (a consequence of the above), just try having a call in Hangouts or Skype and notice that Hangouts has much lower audio lag, doesn't kick out people constantly even when screen sharing, etc
* Is now owned by Microsoft
* Never cared about privacy or security (not that Hangouts does, but Skype just sets a very very low precedent)
* Group Messaging is a mess
* Individual Messaging is a mess
The list goes on and on. Its 2016, and "Let's Skype" is not cool anymore. There are much better options available.
This is not negative in itself. I don't like that it's part of a bigger company because of privacy and focus from intelligence agencies and hackers, but that's just me. I could imagine someone else thinking it's positive because it shows professionalism.
Why is this a negative point for you? And why would something like Hangouts be better, or what would you suggest if you wanted to eliminate big companies' products?
No, it isn't short-sighted. On the contrary it is a matter of letting Microsoft earn their trust again at a reasonable pace after almost two decades of systematic abuse. The Halloween documents where published 1998 and it is only the last year or so since they've begun dipping their toes in open source waters. They've thoroughly earned their shame.
Besides, even if everyone at Microsoft has changed attitude that's no excuse. Microsoft has had five years since the acquisition of Skype in 2011. Isn't it, by now, time to stop blaming their predecessors and own up to the current state of affairs?
You read my mind, while we are 99% an open source organisation we have a couple of managers that are strangely MS centric, if it has their stamp on it - it has to be 'enterprise grade' and there for the only serious option for them.
But Skype is a consumer offering. The "enterprise-grade" product is Skype for Business (formerly Lync), which is a completely different product and codebase (and thus, presumably, with completely different bugs and annoyances).
Not true. Lync is a piece of shit. My current company uses Sky pe for business and guess what is the most annoying aspect: messages don't reach the other end sometimes!!!!!
It also freezes, a LOT. We finally forced our manager to let us use Slack and we love it.
I actually don't mind Lync where I work, although I exclusively use it for IMing and sending pictures of chips back and forth. I'd personally prefer an IRC chat that everyone is logged into, but my guess is that the less technologically-inclined folks on my shift would definitely prefer Lync, and it's fine for my purposes anyway.
altho google hangouts seems better, talking conferencing with a room full of people with mic-speaker setup seems to work better with skype. something to do with AGC and controlling feedback better. maybe hangouts fixed it but it didn't work a year ago.
Hangouts works very well for this now. Well, Chromebox for Meetings (the business version of hangouts group chat) does. It has hardware support for encoding/decoding and generally does a much better job of it than just trying to use 1:1 hangouts via browsers.
That said, it's still far inferior to any commercial videoconferencing product I've ever seen. Literally, the only advantages are cost & integration with other Google services (which is only an advantage if you're already a Google Apps customer).
Skype is shit, but Hangouts is not even a contender
* No desktop client
* Connected to your google account meaning I'll need to juggle several google accounts to keep my personal and business chats separate
Just the fact it doesn't have a native desktop client makes it unusable. I know there are workarounds I can use like nativefier but it's still not as smooth as a desktop app.
Running in the browser:
- Gets grouped with my other browser windows in my taskbar, making it hard to find
- Notifications might or might not work, depending on firefox's whims
- If for any reason firefox crashes all your communication crashes with it
- Susceptible to every single browser bug that allows silent loading of extensions that scrape all your data
>> Connected to your google account meaning I'll need to juggle several google accounts to keep my personal and business chats separate
>This would be easier with Skype if you have 2 Skype accounts?
to some extent. depending on how you start a hangouts, you have no idea what account it's going to start under. The number of times I've gotten on a work call on my personal account because google felt it should use that one
I know each Chrome window can be logged into a different account so I wonder if it just uses the last window (and therefore account) you interacted with. That seems to be the case with links I click on in general. It would be nice if they let you select a "default" account or prompted you for google-specific links.
It's trivial with skype. You just start two instances. On Windows, you need to use a third-party tool, on Linux it's as easy as setting HOME to a different folder for the second instance.
(Tedious disclaimer: my opinions only, not representing anybody else or my employer. I work at Google, not on hangouts)
These problems are largely resolved by using chrome. Pop out any tab into its own window, notifications will work reliably, the security model is far stronger, and most important of all: when one tab crashes, it's an independent process so it can't take any other tab with it.
I use this every day without seeing any of these issues.
Skype on Linux is far inferior recently. Mostly due to the fact that the Linux version has been somehow abandoned. It haven't received updates since at least 1 year. For example, one recent change is that when someone sends a picture, on Linux you are sent a link to it, where you have to go to the Skype website and login in order to view it (and login each time you open a link). Sometimes it's a resized version of the picture which makes things worse. Another thing is the screen sharing. On Linux you can't share screen with more that 1 person, making it useless for telcos at work. And there is much more...
>Another thing is the screen sharing. On Linux you can't share screen with more that 1 person, making it useless for telcos at work. And there is much more...
Consider yourself lucky, for me screen sharing doesn't seem to work at all.
I gave up on Skype screen sharing forever ago. Even with good connections it would pixelate and distort to being illegible too often.
I, frankly haven't found Hangouts much better. We've all but given up on them and use a combo of a free-ish conference app like Uber Conference and Join.Me, Slack, and FaceTime for audio. Except for the one guy with Android, that I then wind up actually having to call from my phone. Ugh, who wants to use a phone these days?
I've switched from Linux to OS X 3 years ago, and even then Skype on Linux was considered abandonware and far inferior to the other OS's versions. It's sad to see it doesn't seem to get any better.
most of the people I know, regardless of what platform they use seem to think that skype sucks. especially if they tried to use it on their mobile phones. We all put up with it because there are no real competitors, and the open source alternatives are all pretty lacking as well
tbf maintaining anything proprietary under linux is a chore, with the ABI changing every year for no reason and yet having to support users having all kind of version combinations. I can see how a company would hate devoting that much resources for pleasing a smaller user base.
Gnome and KDE run in userspace. They are desktop environments, they don't "break userspace".
I feel like you're talking about GTK and Qt, both of which (don't break userspace either) are libraries you can statically link and nothing will break.
they both break library compatibility and break their environment (like when kde removed the widget toolbar and a whole lot of app suddenly stopped working)
sure you can have bunch of ifdef in the code, and an autoconf, and make sure you support a wide set of options, but that is basically the whole point, it makes for a painful experience and costlier, slower development (for closed source application that comes prepackaged)
I feel like you do not understand the concept of static linking, because the entire point is that you don't need a bunch of ifdefs, since you target exactly the version you develop against and ship with it.
The problem is services and non-ABI/non-library APIs. The way I suspect that this is set up is that there is precisely one KDE widget displayer service at any given time, running as part of the desktop environment and presenting an IPC interface that widgets talk to to get themselves added to the widget display area that the window manager maintains. You can link statically to the KDE widget client libraries all you want; if the KDE widget server decides to change the language it speaks, your widgets are hosed unless you included a not-a-widget mode that makes it a normal window. Seeing as how widgets tend to have special build systems (or, worse, the widget server is actually an interpreter for a declaration-heavy widget definition language that's not strictly plaintext), I don't think I've ever seen a widget with a non-widget mode supported.
"Breaking userspace" probably is a misnomer, if only because userspace has a precise technical definition. This is more like changing an interpreted language without maintaining backwards compatibility (python3, anybody?) or changing a json API.
While that may very well be true I feel like this doesn't have much to do anymore with:
> with the ABI changing every year for no reason and yet having to support users having all kind of version combinations.
To which I originally replied. And my point here still stands. I'm not arguing about the backwards or forward compatibility of every single library that might or might not use an IPC mechanism to talk to another component which could break if they're different versions.
the example I gave is exactly how stuff has broken in projects. static linked on a kde library that had widget, new one doesn't have that nor a fallback, application crashes.
or just go get some old static compiled stuff run on your modern distro and see yourself. like, mindrover the europa project port.
Completely off topic but thank you ! I was starting C programming and I was wondering how to check an executable dependencies. If I were to package an executable which was dynamically linked to use it on another computer without recompiling binaries, how could I proceed ? does ldd show the dependencies of the dependencies too ? Would it be sufficient to put all shared libraries into the same folder as the executable ? thanks.
Even better, one can embed the relative path to dynamic libraries by editing the RPATH or RUNPATH attributes in the binary (and using $ORIGIN in the path). Check out chrpath and patchelf.
> maintaining anything proprietary under linux is a chore, with the ABI changing every year for no reason
Is Skype a special snowflake to the extent that it's an impossible task? Skype-on-Linux's problem are caused by interface changes with the server API, not the ABI. Recompiling isn't rocket science.
More and more companies are just publishing their repos for Debian/Ubuntu/RHEL/CentOS/Fedora/SuSE, which are built automatically from same source. If you have a problem with that, hire a developer.
if abi changes keep breaking things, how come skype keeps working even though microsoft barely ever updates it? For a while we were still on version 2, until microsoft decided to break the server protocol, but that version ran for ages without any updates.
Traditionally, the distros do the packaging on their own. I've seen this happen plenty with proprietary software (which will often release a single deb or rpm from which the other distros make their own packages).
Static linking would solve this. You end up with a bigger application and have to do updates every time a library needs a security patch. But you have this anyway if e.g. you release a python application on Windows.
For an excellent and disruption-free experience I use Mumble and if I have to WebRTC, but the browser experience isn't as stable, performant and reliable. Nothing beats Mumble if video isn't a requirement. You can join free Mumble servers, host your own or rent a server. It's open source, so you're not at the whim of a company and integration with your operating system is much better.
update 1: https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Features
It has encryption which cannot be disabled and the advanced audio features make it well suited for reliable and pleasant day to day use. It's low-latency and instead of a centrally managed contact database like most commercial services have Mumble uses certificates for authentication and identification of your friends across servers.
update 2: There are alternative server implementations, one in C and another one in Go, meant to run on OpenWRT in terms of hardware requirements.
I run mumble as well, it really is awesome as long as you dont need video, like you said. I constantly tell people about it, because I refuse to use a non foss app for communication on my pc. (Ventrillo, teamspeak, etc)
I have poked around with Jitsi but its setup is too complicated for normal users.
Mumble/Murmur is awesome, but I was always having issues with it. It seems to take a lot of fiddling on the client and server sides before you can get a good connection that works. It needs a lot of polish before it will be usable for mainstream.
If the claim that the Linux client is no longer able to join calls is true, I think the Skype team really needs to respond.
Microsoft has been doing all sorts of cool things lately and it's odd that the Skype team hasn't been a part of this movement toward a modern, multi-platform world.
In my little corner of that world as the owner of an agency which spends money on Skype credit every day and uses Skype for a healthy part of our business communications, if Linux users start having trouble connecting to calls we are done with Skype immediately. There are enough alternatives out there nowadays that we will drop this tool.
> If the claim that the Linux client is no longer able to join calls is true, I think the Skype team really needs to respond.
I made a call this morning (6 hours ago) and it worked[0] at that time.
I'm not on the same machine right now, but it is a Debian 8 64-bit build. Just installing Skype was a total pain.
If there was a viable alternative that had all the services Skype offers (Skype-Out and local numbers as well as the usual video/voice calling) I'd switch to it. However, I also need to convince my 70 year old Mum, on the other side of the world, who still uses Windows XP, because she's "used to it", and doesn't own a smartphone to switch too.
I've just seen ring.cx mentioned above and might investigate further.
[0] Worked: The person on the other end could hear and see me.
Telegram already has all the pieces needed to add voice chat on all the platforms it supports. I wouldn't be surprised if eating Skype's lunch is part of their monetization plan.
This might not be the ops problem but the following solved this for me. I had used a bunch of firewall rules to block ads. Inadvertently that blocker blocked key IPs and domains that Skype requires to make group calls and chats. Switching those off made Skype work normally again.
What I don’t understand is - Why is there not a serious competitor to Skype?
If there was a cross-platform Skype clone that worked on OSX, Linux, Windows, iOS and Android that was stable and secure - the whole world would jump onto it. All it has to do is not be a bloated piece of crap like Skype.
Indeed. There are lots of apps that cover parts of its functionality, but not all. We keep trying to introduce new alternatives at work, but to date nothing has passed the test.
Calls, group calls, chat, group chat, video, screenshare. For one communications client those are the boxes it needs to tick. Any suggestions?
Tox does all of that. XMPP does all of that. WebRTC does all of that. There are tons of shitty proprietary clones of Skype that also do all of that, too. There are plenty of options, people just don't use them because all their friends are on Skype.
Tox is getting there, but it doesn't appear to support asynchronous messaging that syncs later when some of the people in a chat are offline. If that's wrong let me know.
>XMPP does all of that.
That's like saying "TCP does all that". Would you like to name programs that support the full list?
>WebRTC does all of that.
As far as I can tell WebRTC has nothing to do with chat.
Asynchronous messaging depends on a server to hold your messages for delivery when you go offline. That implies some company being behind the service to host that server, along with centralization and the ability of deanonymization. I'm sure there are clients that do support it, but I wouldn't want to use it. Proper Tox style would probably be to host your own bouncer server, like IRC, for that use.
I don't actually use XMPP, but a quick Google gives a list that do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_instant_messagin... for example. Would you be upset if I said "IRC does that" if you asked for messaging? Why aren't you upset that I pointed at Tox, which is also a protocol with separate implementations? Your point about TCP, while meant to be a critism, is actually spot on: It is a protocol. Anyone can implement it and talk to all other XMPP (or Tox!) clients, unlike Skype which is completely proprietary and closed ecosystem.
Pointing at only one client shows favoritism and is disingenuous, since you could point out "<x> doesn't implement <y>!" when another client does, while if it's supported in the protocol it CAN be support by any of the clients.
You're actually right about the WebRTC point: it inherently doesn't support text, it's for p2p signaling. Most implementations do have a textbox for communication, however, and have the same benefit as Tox or XMPP: It's a protocol. Just because one site doesn't do it, doesn't mean any other site can't and inter-op with all other providers.
>Asynchronous messaging depends on a server to hold your messages for delivery when you go offline.
You can get 90% of the benefit by having other clients in the chat act as relays for that chat. No centralization required. You'd only need a bouncer for specific situations, like mobile<->mobile chat with all desktop clients shut off.
>Would you be upset if I said "IRC does that" if you asked for messaging?
If I asked for just messaging, I would accept "IRC". But if I ask for video chat, and a tiny fraction of IRC clients did video chat, I would not accept "IRC" as an answer. If you want to name a protocol, the implementations need to have widespread support for the entire list of features. Theoretical support is not good enough. I agree that universal support is unnecessary, but widespread support is a must.
It looks like "XMPP+Jingle" is a pretty good answer, but I'd have to look into it more.
I don't actually have any idea about how group chats are implemented in Tox, but I don't see why you can't send messages to the people in the group to redistribute when people get back. It sounds like it might have history consistency issues, but maybe they already do that.
I assumed you were talking about one-on-one message relaying, which is probably what most people would care about. That can't really be solved, since one of the goals of Tox is also to prevent 3rd parties from being able to tell who you are talking to. Can't do that if you have to broadcast to users "send this message to <x> when they get back"...
From what I could see group chats don't have it yet. And note that I said multiple clients, not multiple users. If you or your chat partner have their desktop turned on it should be able to take messages and forward them to your cell phone.
No suggestions, but I think those features scream "Slack" in my opinion. It would make a lot of sense to have those features in a service that is the center of communication for many teams anyway.
I've been using Slack (https://slack.com/) for a while too... it does everything useful, and everything it doesn't do natively, there's an integration for. You can do:
- Private chat with one or more parties
- Open Group chat via channels (both private and public channels)
- Voice/Video via numerous integrations including Bluejeans, Appear.in, Skype, Hangouts, you name it.
- ChatOps via services like IFTT & Zapier or even your own custom bridge into your network.
- Get notifications right in Slack from your source control, build servers, JIRA, Confluence and any number of other services via webhook integrations.
- A billion other wicked cool integrations (https://slack.com/apps) that allow you to do just about anything, including the eternally useless, often inappropriate and highly amusing Giphy.
- It's free(ish)... the featureset is restricted on the free account, but it has enough to be useful to small startups even of adhoc members. For teams there is a small per user/per month charge which unlocks a wealth of enterprise ready features.
- It's searchable
Highly recommended and well worth a look for small and large teams alike.
Probably because there isn't any money in it so every company that can afford has to use it as a device to push their other products. e.g how Hangouts was designed to push G+ and Chrome usage.
My family and I have had more success with Facebook Messenger's video chat than with Skype: the people we want to talk to (grandparents, aunts, etc) are already on Facebook, and the only trouble is that you have to determine whether to accept on your phone or your computer.
Skype has been getting worse and worse over the years. Personally I've switched to Telegram for chats, and I'll be looking for alternatives as far as voice calls are concerned.
I was thinking on this topic. You know what's the problem with alternatives? Nobody uses them. I'm seriously pissed off by this.
I recently saw how all my friends moved to Telegram, and this is nice. But for instance my company has daily skype calls, and I have to get skype for those.
I eventually decided to give it up on my (Linux) laptop and get the calls only on Android, where it still sucks, but at least it works.
I don't understand why people on HN are still recommending Telegram. It's not open, the crypto is highly questionable, and messages are not encrypted end-to-end by default (and not at all in groups). Use one of the apps that gets a full score in the EFF's Secure Messaging Scorecard [1], like Signal.
If you've got a better suggestion for secure group chats on iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, OS X, and Windows, please let me know! My family uses telegram extensively, but I'd love to replace it with something better if there's anything with similarly good UX on all of the platforms we use.
I'm not. I'm just saying that the majority of my friends are using it. For me it's better than skype and whatsapp. The GNU/Linux client works fine (although I'm not a big fan of its codebase: I had a look at it and guess what…)
It's true that not all of my criteria are included in the scorecard. For one thing, it's based on the statements of the developers, so if they say "it's encrypted", the EFF takes them at their word, and doesn't investigate the quality of the crypto. It also doesn't consider usability issues (secure defaults).
These three issues are kind of connected. They're requesting you your Google account email so they can associate your account with their private beta (available in the Chrome store) and let you install it from the Chrome's webstore.
You can go the other way around and "build" it. Just clone their repo and point Chrome to the cloned directory so that it knows that there's an unsigned extension there. Done.
Yes. On a mobile. We might have a different interpretations of the GP's requirements.
Given that they replaced Lync/Skype for Business™ I assume they ideally want a comparable offering: Voice and chat for a number of platforms.
Signal would give you voice on mobiles only and chat on mobiles only, ignoring the Chrome App beta thing.
I might be entirely wrong, but I assumed that the GP chose Telegram for now due to the multi-platform support (chat on all platforms, replacing Lync/Skype in that regard completely). If that is correct, moving to Signal would be a trade-off, exchanging multi-platform support for voice calls. It's not a solution, it's a different subset of Lync's/Skype's feature set
Once on of your contact uninstall Signal without disabling it first, you will have to long press the send button EACH time you want to text them. Annoying as hell, it made me stop using Signal.
It's a shame discord brands itself so thoroughly as a gaming communication solution. I've had friends (not business contacts!) decline to switch to it because it's not a general chat program but a chat program for gamers.
Linphone (VoIP) works beautifully, is free software and is cross-platform (also works on android). It's also lightweight and personally I find the quality of calls to be superior to Skype.
The last time I used this tool (two years ago, I think), it was quite problematic to have it running. I was not able to find a suitable tutorial for it. Was this problem fixed nowadays?
Really? I used it for the past four years with no problems whatsoever. I used it since I linked a VoIP number to a landline in order to be called for free from my parents with no tech hassle.
What kind of problems did you have? Usually its just a matter of installing it, (optionally) make an account on the Linphone site and get it running.
I'm surprised people still even use Skype, I went really down hill around 5 or so years ago. It's slow, bulky, closed source and it has been disclosed by Edward Snowden and Wikileaks to have ties directly into the prism program with the NSA.
My thoughts exactly. There have been better alternatives out there for a few years now. Whenever a client or customer requests a Skype call these days, there are always a few raised eyebrows.
While I'm unsure about the inability to join calls, I can at least agree that the Linux client is terrible.
I finally caved a few months ago, got an account, and started using it ("oh wow it handles 's/woops/fixed/', that's awesome")... until the client began freezing, chewing 100% CPU for as long as I patiently left it running, and not getting itself sorted out. Removing ~/.Skype (XDG, anybody?) and re-signing in worked... for about 3 minutes, at which point my profile data re-synced, and the client began choking again.
Last I tried the Web-integrated version (Skype icon, top-right of outlook.com et. al., takes a minute to become clickable) I couldn't even type "/me ..." - the line would send verbatim. At that point I gave up completely.
I used to use IRC but I find it too Spartan nowadays, but on the other hand I don't want to have to remember what chat tab is in what window, and I can't handle the idea of running 15 isolated instances of Webkit for all the separate chat systems out there, so that kills websites and most current "desktop" chat clients.
I don't use the Internet to communicate much, somewhat ironically. Everything drives me to distraction.
- I cannot help but admire the reverse-engineering going on at https://github.com/EionRobb/skype4pidgin/tree/master/skypewe... to make the outlook/skype web integration programmatically consumable. I have no idea how it works but the commits are very recent, which is a big positive sign.
> until the client began freezing, chewing 100% CPU for as long as I patiently left it running, and not getting itself sorted out.
The same happens for me on iOS and OS X quite often. I disabled mobile data and push notifcations on iOS as it sucked up tonnes of data (I've seen 30MB/day even when I haven't opened the app), and repeated or delayed notifications. Whenever I open a conversation I have to leave it 30s - 1 minute until it updates with the latest messages.
I have to admit, searching for "skype 100% cpu" or similar shows lots of people having this problem on Windows and OS X, so I wonder if I'm not just seeing disasterousness in a shared part of the codebase.
I never even touched the mobile app though; 30MB/day is insane. Wow...
> XDG: TL;DR = says stuff should be in ~/.config, ~/.cache, etc.
XDGBDS is such an unstandard even xdg-utils doesn't care for it. And Skype predates XDGBDS (let alone whatever the current version of XDGBDS is this week).
Also you're wrong, XDG doesn't say stuff should be in specific directories, it defines envvars specifying directories with various defaults, defaults which are at best only correct on Linux distros which purport to follow XDG, which you can't test for because XDGBDS didn't see fit to define a way to say it.
> XDGBDS is such an unstandard even xdg-utils doesn't care for it.
:o, TIL
> And Skype predates XDGBDS (let alone whatever the current version of XDGBDS is this week).
Of course, but that's no real excuse for it not to get with the times.
> Also you're wrong, XDG doesn't say stuff should be in specific directories, it defines envvars specifying directories with various defaults,
you are of course right; I overly-condensed my TL;DR. Those are the default directories, yes, but it defines XDG_CONFIG_HOME (~/.config), XDG_CACHE_HOME (~/.cache), etc.
> defaults which are at best only correct on Linux distros which purport to follow XDG, which you can't test for because XDGBDS didn't see fit to define a way to say it.
Another TIL... and that's just crazy.
What about OS policy being that "all shell environments shall be supplied with stock configuration that defines the XDG environment envvars as a sign of compatibility and compliance"? Keep them at ~/.config et al., just define them - because if they're defined, that indicates the environment is very likely to be sanely configured (for (stereo)typical values of "sane").
I use web.skype.com these days. I don't want that piece of crapware installed on my box, as I don't trust it.
The web client works well enough for chat so I can talk to my friends who don't want to move away from it.
It does however not support calls since for some reason it needs a browser plugin for that. WebRTC would clearly be too easy.
So I just link people a Firefox Hello link whenever they want to use voice.
No it does not. I used skype for work for hours a day, until Microsoft bought them. They put out a terrible Linux version which was so bad I had to downgrade.
I then refused to upgrade until I got daily notifications that my old version would be disabled from connecting.
I upgraded, as forced, and that was the last time I was able to make calls or do screen sharing.
Chat still works.
It worked before Microsoft, it did not work after Microsoft.
I've been using Slack (https://slack.com/) for a while too... it does everything useful that you could ask of a chat application and works very much like IRC worked back in the day. Everything it doesn't do natively, there's an integration for, just like with IRC bots.
You can do:
- Private chat with one or more parties
- Open Group chat via channels (both private and public channels)
- Voice/Video via numerous integrations including Bluejeans, Appear.in, Skype, Hangouts, you name it.
- ChatOps via services like IFTT & Zapier or even your own custom bridge into your network.
- Get notifications right in Slack from your source control, build servers, JIRA, Confluence and any number of other services via webhook integrations.
- A billion other wicked cool integrations (https://slack.com/apps) that allow you to do just about anything, including the eternally useless, often inappropriate and highly amusing Giphy.
- It's free(ish)... the featureset is restricted on the free account, but even with the free account it has enough to be seriously useful to even loosely defined teams of adhoc members. For enterprise requirements there is a small per user/per month charge which unlocks a wealth of enterprise ready features.
- It's archivable & searchable
Highly recommended and well worth a look for small and large teams alike.
It's more targeted at teams, but for circles of friends, it works nicely too. Because of the way it's structured, it works more like a web based, centrally hosted IRC server than Skype, as such it doesn't really have the same network effect, but it's so much more flexible than Skype in every other respect.
The free tier has a very limited history, which defeats the point of using Slack, since you lose your history. And there's really no point in using Slack if you don't have a history you can rely on, might as well use IRC.
And once you start paying, $7-$15 per user/month is not what I'd call cheap. It's cheap compared to a salary, but such costs pile up.
> Voice/Video via numerous integrations including Bluejeans, Appear.in, Skype, Hangouts, you name it.
Which is another way of saying that it doesn't solve the problems that Skype does, so it's not an alternative.
The problem with IRC is that the plugins aren't as discoverable and more of a pain in the neck to integrate.
When you're not in channel on IRC, you don't have access to anything that was said prior to joining the channel which means you don't even have any immediate history, or context to a conversation that is ongoing when you join. At least with Slack you have 10,000 messages of history, which is at least enough to give you the context of the discussion.
Also while probably irrelevant on a technical level, it's just not as pretty and user friendly as Slack.
All these issues you mentioned are solved by using IRCCloud or Quassel – I currently have a backlog for the channels I’m in via Quassel back to 2014 – available in the app, over the webapp, via the program on Windows, Mac and Linux.
For most people, the limited history isn't really an issue. For most enterprise tools you're looking at paying thousands to tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. In comparison, the cost to get the enterprise features out of Slack is a drop in the ocean.
The joy of adhoc plugins is that you don't need any specific one to get the benefits. It's like a directory of alternatives to Skype that all do an appropriate job. It's more discoverable than say trying to find an alternative to Skype via a Google search. New apps/integrations are added daily, giving you visibility to alternatives every day.
I've used Skype for years, and I can honestly tell you that while Skype may have an unlimited history. In practice, that unlimited history is a pain in the ass to search, to the point that it may as well not have unlimited history. So from my perspective I'd equally say that the "non-limited history for free" of Skype is an equally straw-man argument.
They used to have bot integration which was awesome and allowed us to pipe information in and out from our other systems, but they terminated bot integration which was a huge nail in the coffin for us.
Slack is nice and very useful. As you mention there are a ton of integrations- there's cool new uses every day, but I don't see why it would need to be part of your audio/video/conference flow other than as links to join or something of the sort.
For instance, to get everyone into a Join.Me conference I just copy/paste the link into the channel and people connect from their browser/desktop app/phone app- but it would've been the same with email.
I feel like the audio/video is the one place where Slack doesn't really add value to the flow, other than what Slack already does- makes it easier to give the connection info to your group/channel.
I don't know about anyone else, but 90% of my use of Skype is for voice or video calls. There's a lot of competition out there for chat apps, but sadly very little for voice/video (network effect rules all, of course)
46 active contacts and 12 blocked account in my Skype 4.3.0.37 (2014 Skype and/or Microsoft Patents Pending)
Family: Wife (mac), Mom(ubuntu) and Sister(win)
All - Family = work or business (i can safely say that 90% are OS from MS).
Do I want all those contacts in my slack ?
No i don't.
Do I want to change to another very powerful chat system?
Well, sometimes connect sqlite3 to find a conversation is not really what i want to do but the problem is to use chat system as storage for important communication so, No I don't what another shitty chat system.
My "rest folder" contains current work, future work, very good and bad work experiences from the past and maybe unplanned new jobs.
People are still there in green every morning cause they may want support or want to give jobs and after they pay they tends to use less email and more (shitty) chat systems.
In my case skype is only for work and i don't what to confuse the clear skype sound in my phone with something else that the work. Remove those contacts today means lose money tomorrow, i cannot remove that program and it is immediately installed after vim and git.
So after declaring to be a slave of skype like many others,
I don't ask microsoft to change it, to fix it, to improve it or do it more cool or modern. I ask for my freedom: We need public, usable and having a sane license API to build something _better_ around it and remove that green icon from the status bar or my GNU/Linux Mint.
What if there was a free, interoperable protocol that could connect anything to anything?
That's what we are trying to achieve with Matrix (https://matrix.org) - making apps connect either natively or via gateways/bridges.
We already have bridges to IRC, Slack, and libpurple! Ideally we would connect all services to each other, but obvs we can only do so for those who offer an API.
In Matrix, you can set up a WebRTC call with any Matrix-user, and the user can take the call in whatever Matrix-client he wants. We already have open source clients for web, iOS and Android!
My biggest disappointment with the business version the fact that it is impossible to turn off the pop up notification when somebody logs in or out from Skype. Before you post me URL from the support website, non of them works, everybody in the office (10+ engineers) tried to disable this but no success. The only way you block that is to put yourself into do not disturb mode, but than non of the legitimate notifications are displayed either. Skype for business is a perfect distraction tool without providing any quality or functionality that other software already have. I just do not understand that in 2016 MS is at this level when it comes to user experience after being in the user facing software business over 40 years.
If that's Skype For Business, you've got somebody who set it up in a really bizarre way. It's such a clusterfuck of policies and settings that I'm not sure just where that would be set or what powershell gods you have to worship to straighten it out, but that's not the default out-of-the-box behavior.
The client is trash, though. Never understood why you can't run multiple accounts, or at least multiple instances without massive hoop-jumping. Aside from some reskins, it's the same as the Lync 2013 client, and that wasn't much of a change on the 2010, or even 2007 client.
As a Linux guy, I tried to setup Office365 OneDrive for the technologically illiterate side of the office, because they get 1TB. Set it up on a 7 computer, an 8.1, and a 10. Used the registry key to activate business accounts mode. Made an Office356 Group to have a shared directory. Looked at every alt menu and right click menu for shared directory options. Nobody could see anybody else's content no matter what I did. Then I spent 10 minutes setting up a NAS on a random PC and mounting it on all the other computers, used OneDrive on that PC and was good to go. I think I'll never use one drive, I've never had a sharing issue with any other cloud drive provider.
To echo shrikant, I also don't have this issue at my place of employment. Perhaps it's a setting at the administrative level? I can only agree with you that Skype for business is a pretty lackluster tool, and it's a real shame that the company I work for pays for it. To make things worse, there's apparently a separate, more expensive license required to do video/audio chat. This means that for remote meetings I have to not only sign in through SfB (for screen sharing and generally knowing who's in a meeting), but I have to use my desk phone to dial into a conference call. Yuck.
Do you mean Skype for Business aka Lync? We use SfB extensively at my workplace, and I don't see these log in/out notifications at all, even when I want to!
I found that very annoying as well. The way I found to turn the behavior off in Skype For Business 2016 is to individually right-click on each contact's name and then un-check "Tag for Status Change Alerts".
This is very disappointing. Skype has been one of those "just works" solutions for calling distant family members - even if they're running underpowered hardware.
I currently use https://tel.red/ to connect to Lync / "Skype for Business" on Linux. I wonder if that's a possible solution?
I've run Hangouts on a 1st gen netbook (Asus EEE PC) without any performance issues.
The only times where performance could be an issue is when you are running a video conference call which technically Skype doesn't really supports (w/o a premium or business account).
It depends on allot of things if you are using some fancy super duper HD camera and hanging out with 10 other people all using the highest possible bit rate streaming also you'll need a good computer with graphics hardware that will support all the required features for hardware acceleration in Chrome.
Back then there was almost no video HW acceleration in hangouts anyhow (well in Chrome) not on the silly 1st gen Atom for sure and it still worked fairly well (at about 60% CPU usage IIRC) even with the 720p camera on the EEE PC.
And it's not that Skype would be any better in that regards Skype might have slightly bigger selection of video codecs (Google probably had too back when Google Talk had actually a thick client) but Hangouts is limited more or less to video streams that Chrome can handle which usually means current web video formats.
Lync (their custom, completely incompatibile VOIP solution sold to -- idiots, essentially) only works half-decently on windows. There's an OSX option, but it's just a factual checklist on the product spec, as in reality it's garbage.
The best part, is that "skype for business" actually lowers the quality of the product even more. I had my own set of issues with Lync, but it just doubled since we had to transition.
Sad thing is that skype for business/lync is bundled with office products and when we came to some big enterprises they say "we have free lync!". Insane.
I've seen my friends slowly drift away from Skype. At this point when I install a new operating system, I just use web.skype.com to get in touch with my friends that haven''t moved onto something else. It works the same on all platforms, but I don't know if many people know about the web client.
No, that is not the point. The post here is about Skype not working on Linux. If Skype is the only way to reach a person, that would be a real issue. Luckily nearly everyone still has a normal telephone number on which they can be reached. There are many options to dial to normal telephone numbers all over the world at very low cost. For voice communication, people should use established, vendor-independent standards.
Actually I fully agree with you. Linux should be about open standards and freedom. Skype breaks both. I suggest to everyone to use some VoIP app based on open standards (SIP) and not the vendor locked Skype.
CSIPSimple seems to be abandoned. Happy to be corrected. On my network it wasn't handling NAT rewriting at all so I couldn't connect to my ISP's SIP server.
Swift.im looks interesting, thanks for the link. At work most of us use Adium with our XMPP servers, those stuck on Windows have to use pidgin at present which is truly awful so I'll take a look at this for them.
* Doesn't integrate with Keychain, so I always have to login.
* When logging in, pressing TAB when in the username field submits the form rather then go to password field.
* Now I've failed my login enough that I need to reset my password. And Live doesn't let me reuse an old password, guaranteeing I'll lock myself out next time.
* Even better, my Xbox won't login in now, so I either have to do this stupid dance again, or just use the Playstation.
At least on that OS it can be installed in a straightforward way.
If one really wants to install skype on a 64 bits debian, they need to apply loads of tricks (and risk to bork their system in the process).
Last time I attempted that, the package installer prompted me to first uninstall X - the window system - (amongst a whole lot of other crucial software) as incompatible dependencies...
Yes it is, the deb package (provided by microsoft) having been created for an older version of debian (6 or 7) but being the only available one for debian 8... dependencies don't match.
>Skype keeps ignoring people who complain or are having issues with Linux client
Well, if they are too few and far between compared to Windows, OS X, iOS and Android then it makes sense. Opportunity cost et al.
And, while it's often brought up, I think that when it comes to consumer products (as opposed to server and dev stuff) Linux users don't really have some kind of "extra-influence" to compensate for being a niche group.
The Xbox client isn't much better. After install, it would only run for me if I specifically did NOT accept the terms and conditions. Account management is also dodgy as hell.
Unless they start doing something, they will lose market. Whatsapp calls has been rising and people in the gaming world are starting to switch to better alternatives. I don't understand why such little effort. It's not like Skype for android is much better either. I've had trouble with it too.
I've never used Skype. Is there something it does better or differently than any other VOIP/messaging client that's made their poor Linux support such a popular issue, other than it was better before Windows bought it?
My current daily means of communication on Linux is Google Voice/Hangouts, but I've also used others over the years, like GnomeMeeting/Ekiga, TeamViewer, and TeamSpeak. They've all worked fairly easily and without issue. With all the options, could someone explain why Skype matters?
There is one thing that Skype is particularly good at that other VoIP/messaging clients aren't: talking to users who have Skype accounts. Your question is little different than suggesting there are many alternative social networks to Facebook, so why don't people just use those instead?
Skype on Windows is awful. Frequent crashes, shared screens drop all the time, and very inefficient. Only reason it's not uninstalled is that we have to use it at work.
Skype feels like it runs just as well on my brand new laptop as it used to do on my 9 year old machine.
As in not well at all and whenever any progress has been made with computing speed the Skype team have refactored their app to perform just as poorly on the new hardware.
Also why is the "Skype Home" part of the app just a facebook advert? I don't have an FB account so Skype tells me to get one every time I open it. Seemingly FB is more important than my contacts.
Network effects. I've been forced to install the client (Linux) twice for work. Worked fine for calls/chat, but I'm not keen on running it, to say the least.
Also, there are project managers in my industry who check availability of freelancers via Skype, rather than email. Remaining logged in keeps you visible with them. I don't do it, and I find it a shame that this is the state of affairs.
It's simple: Skype is big and everyone's using it. Kind of like Facebook.
I'll give you an example. When Skype goes down, nobody bats an eye. They just wait for it to start working again. When Tox (or to be more precise, qTox) behaves unexpectedly in a single situation, people come to me and say: "It's shit." (literally, no explanation whatsoever).
Since everyone's using it, they think of positively even when it behaves like a complete garbage.
It's the LinkedIn of IMs, huge in the mainstream business market. Most customers expect people to be reachable on Skype or Skype For Business (Lync). If you are a small business, considering you have to keep it on, might as well use it for internal comms as well.
Under the best of circumstances, Skype on WINDOWS is at best barely functional (I know we use it every day for remote business meetings). So I can hardly be surprised any other OS's client is so broken ...
8.5 Billion!
http://www.wired.com/2011/05/microsoft-buys-skype-2/
The Skype app crashes so frequently. When it finally decides to work, the microphone doesn't work. If you feel really really brave, you can try putting the app to background, except that might cause your video feed to not work anymore. Remember those files somebody sent you 3 months ago? Well, you haven't recieved them on this device yet. This is true for Windows, Linux and Android. In an update about a month ago, Windows 10 introduced the "Messaging" and "Video" apps. Which were both based on Skype infrastructure. They.didn't.work. Which makes me wonder if they ever tested them before even releasing them.
To be fair, Hangouts has gotten a bit better, but it still feels like there's nobody actually actively working on any of the apps. Or at least, nobody who is working on the app dogfoods it. But this app is no stranger to ignoring your microphone, or showing you that you're still in a conversation which has ended several hours ago.
Facebook Messenger has not disappointed me yet, which might make it the strongest and most stable contender to date.
Not sure I understand the issue here, can someone summarise? Yes, Skype is an utter POS on Linux (90s UI, total incompatibility with any of the fancy things like picture sharing, inability to join group calls etc.) but the link implies the client can no longer participate in calls. I was chatting to a friend just yesterday via the Linux client - they called me and I accepted the call.
I had to use Skype for work a lot. But things like this and the fact that I don't trust Skype enough to install it, kept me from using it.
So at the time I bought the cheapest Android phone I could find and used it just for Skype, it didnt even have a sim card. And I was always easy to reach for coworkers.
Hopefully this helps someone else in the same position. Luckily I dont have to use Skype anymore.
They keep ignoring all their users, Windows too. A couple of weeks ago, they shipped a completely broken version that would crash regularly and scramble the message order randomly if the messages were sent within ~1 minute. Hello QA? Where are you? Hello beta testing? You cannot ship a program this broken to all your users?!
The Mac OS client is COMPLETELY BROKEN. Message orders change constantly, if you type fast the messages are jumping up and down constantly which is annoying since the order sometimes gets messed up.
Also the background colours of messages are bugged, sometimes my messages are grey, instead of being blue as they should be.
"Completely broken" with all caps would mean "you can't make a call" or "calls get cut short" -- not "message order changes" and "sometimes the background of my messages is a different color".
(In fact the latter points to some color-code of sorts, e.g. grey = message hasn't been received yet, etc).
I recommend trying jitsi (meet.jit.si) for conferences with features.
Ring is a new one, that looks very promising for secure multiplatform p2p one-on-one communication. (ring.cx)
On my phone, I use CsipSimple with my trusty VOIP provider Diamondcard.us.
Some of my contact lists disappeared the other day. I am using Skype 4.3 on Ubuntu 14.04. I am trying to move most of my communication to Slack, but some clients and friends are still on Skype which makes this a pain for me.
Skype for Linux was declared dead under Palmer's, resources reduced to a minimum and new versions and features blocked. Skype CEOs and CTOs at that time are equally responsible, made millions and disappeared. It's been an uphill battle since, you can found some linux developers on LinkedIn and ask them. A joke that goes around is that Skype could die soon this year unless it turns profitable. Anyway, from a business perspective MS doesn't understand or value Linux desktop, so nothing to be surprised here.
When I used to use Skype on OSX I always hated it, people talk about iTunes being bloatware but the amount of resources Skype used was obscene. The final straw was a bug they never fixed that would log me out of Facebook in Safari every time I opened Skype. It was something to do with the fact that I'd foolishly linked my Skype and Facebook accounts in the past, I'm not sure if even to this day they ever fixed that.
Skype on linux is akin to taking fertility drugs on birth control. It's super dumb and always feels dirty for no reason. It installs 127 packages and then removes only 112, leaving me saying I knew this was a mistake so that I could waste 15 minutes with TopTal because they can't get on a hangout. Skype is owned by the original nerd's evil empire what do you expect. Never should have tainted my system...
This is not just limited to linux. I use skype occasionally on blackberry and their app on blackberry is despicable. They made slight bug fixes 6 months back after some 2 years of not updating the app. Now it works but still experience lot of crashes. They never bothered to release a native app and people just the android ported one.
Skype is far inferior to any competitor. I just send a link to people through https://apprtc.appspot.com/ to have better video call experience. Skype does not even keep track of notifications cross devices. It was way better in the old days.
yes the linux client sucks... bu the OTHER linux client (i.e. Android) works beautifully. Which is why I cant wait for things like RemixOS or Intel's Android Linux [1]. With predictions that mobile chips will approach PS4 performance in 2017 [2], I cant help but wonder again if Valve made a colossal mistake in not basing SteamOS on desktop android.
Wow. My previous job had no phones only skype and most of us just had linux on our desktops.
There is a solution - Cisco Jabber. They have a hosted solution now. I can't find a link currently and I haven't used it since we have it on-premise. But I did talk with someone recently who worked on their cloud product.
Skype on Windows is also a disaster. I only use it to instant message, not call, and it still takes multiple minutes to start up. I really want an alternative but have been lazy about making the switch. Maybe today will be the day I do that. Any good alternative IM clients with cross platform support?
I keep having inability to join calls, getting stuck in calls and at worst even having the client say I'm not in any calls and no sound coming out of my speakers while others can still see me in the call and hear my microphone.
Honestly I'm really happy they haven't updated the client. Looking at the Windows client, I was happy they left a more serious and professional client for the Linux users.
Of course when you can't make calls anymore, it might be time to update the failing component...
Oh come on, they ignore people who complain about the iOS client too. They just ignore everyone and refuse to iterate or innovate. Personally, I don't understand why people pay to use them when Google Hangouts has so many better features and a clearer UI.
The deep irony of this is that I prefer the linux client to the windows one (or did until it broke, haven't tried to make a call recently), because it is ad free, clean and simple. I wish there was a reverse-wine I could use to run it on windows.
I don't think you should ever try, but you can give cygwin a shot. You can, supposedly, get most linux packages running on Windows with Cygwin, but it would be almost as much work as Linux From Scratch.
Sounds like great justification for my business contacts why I cannot have a voice call in Skype with them. Could anybody please give a link to official bugreport or serious announcement about breakage of calls?
The quality of outbound calls to telephones ("Skype Out" I think) has dropped markedly recently. My respondants can't hear me about half the time. The quality seems to come and go by the week.
As someone who works in the VoIP mobile client area for 7 years (though not for Skype) I have to be fair and say that this is unlikely to be Skypes fault.
They are known to use state of the art codecs so most likely the issue lies in the PSTN network that you are calling into.
For the out calling feature they are relying on Carriers all around the world for the VoIP -> PSTN functionality.
It would be another thing if you said that VoIP -> VoIP quality has dropped, here Skype has somewhat more control, although still not perfect control as they rely on the quality of Internet connection between caller and callee.
If the destination number is in the t-mobile network then they can't chose that the call doesn't go into t-mobiles network.
They can control one part of it, the point where their VoIP is transcoded and switched into the network, here could lie the issue. But the issue could also come from the destination end of the network.
I generally believe that US and EU carriers are solid enough that calling there shouldn't cause issues, but who knows whom the parent is calling.
Could be Afghanistan for all I know and I am not as confident here that there wont be any issues that are definitely out of control for Skype.
In some cases the carrier might even wilfully degrade the quality because they want to earn more. They earn less if Skype routes a caller from the US to Afghanistan via IP and lets him call from a Afghan to Afghan number.
Microsoft is doing a service to all of us by destroying Skype. Nobody should use it anyway from the moment MS has bought it with sole purpose of handing data over to NSA&Friends.
Secondly webrtc requires you to coordinate, it's not like I can just call someone. Just as well we could use TeamSpeak or Ventrilo or any of the old solutions.
They might be pushing users away from the Linux/Mac apps towads an online version of skype. Which is actually the easiest way to use their service, when you absolutely have to.
Discord is the best alternative, or at least it will be. It lacks 1to1 calls yet but they will be implemented. There are no plans for video or screen share yet i think though
The longer MS ignores Skype on linux, the happier I'll be. Unlike the Windows version, it's at least usable and a great deal more stable (in my experience, anyway)
Precisely. Like Pidgin using the MSN network, it didn't have any of the problems that Windows Live Messenger had (like shutting down when Microsoft wished it and forcing you over to Skype - the network itself kept running just fine for 2 years after that point).
I'm surprised M$ haven't killed skype like the next day they bought it as they often do when they buy/take over companies and their products.
Skype is actually the only M$ product I use, and I would be more than happy to move to anything else as long as there would be a good alternative to it...
I doubt ads is the main source of revenue. They do sell DIDs, VOIP calls to landline phones and mobiles (with insane rates) so ads (only in few countries) doesn't account for much.
M$ bought lots of companies before, that eventually came to EOL even though they were doing pretty well before M$ bought them, it's not particularly about the skype (even though we see it gets worse over the time).
Fun fact: I have a friend who worked for Skype in Prague. He said the codebase is a true horror, an extreme mess, and that soon it would "reach a singularity" :-) He also said that there are whole parts of the codebase that he was not allowed to see, all indications pointing to stuff related to routing the traffic through servers of "the man" ;-)