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Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

nickforall.nl

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Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

#171

Post by cm3 »

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.

Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

#172

Post by cakes »

anon4 wrote: post #148
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

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.

Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

#173

Post by oddvar »

mcs_ wrote: post #162

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…

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!

Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

#174

Post by z3t4 »

xiaoma wrote: post #99
nakedrobot2 wrote: post #31

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…

Google talk circa 2008 was a lot nicer than Hangouts is now, too. The resource usage was lower, the UI was nicer and it was more responsive. It's really a shame they killed it.

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.

Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

#175

Post by mrmondo »

tychuz wrote: post #139
mrmondo wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do have my own suspicions that a certain company deliberately degrades the quality of any software they release for platforms other than their own.

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 zeal…

Pretty fud reply I'm sorry to say, did you even read what I wrote before getting on the zealot bandwagon? I didn't even mention Linux?

Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

#176

Post by lawl »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #146
lawl wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with the ABI changing every year for no reason and yet having to support users having all kind of version combinations. What? That is simply not true, the Kernel never breaks userspace. And "version combinations" are solved by linking statically.

gnome breaks userspace, kde breaks userspace etc. skype is not just linked against the kernel after all, but a whole lot of different components

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.

Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

#177

Post by Gratsby »

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.

Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

#180

Post by anon4 »

me_bx wrote: post #24
spronkey wrote: post #17

It's not just the Linux client. The Windows client has terrible usability issues too.

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...

That seems to be a Debian packaging issue, since all you need to run skype are the 32-bit libs it uses. I run it on Arch with no problem.
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