Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

nickforall.nl

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 483 posts

Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

#271

Post by omegaham »

ygra wrote: post #248
mrmondo wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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.

Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

#272

Post by [deleted] »

davedx wrote: post #158
xiaoma wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yet Hangouts is much lower friction and generally easier to use than Skype! What good alternatives are there to Hangouts? Preferably something that doesn't require flaky browser plugins.

[deleted]

Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

#273

Post by pyre »

smarinov wrote: post #260
cookiecaper wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Thanks for letting us know it was dead. I haven't realised it for the part few years of daily usage.

Mozilla has terminated development IIRC. This is probably what was meant.

Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

#274

Post by callinyouin »

StreamBright wrote: post #60

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 notificati…

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.

Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

#275

Post by balabaster »

There are viable alternatives to Skype.

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.

Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

#276

Post by manyxcxi »

S4M wrote: post #54
haddr wrote: post #40

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 th…

>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?

Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

#277

Post by pyre »

cookiecaper wrote: post #262
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.

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 t…

Depending know how horrible it gets that starts to affect maintainability and development of new features.

Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

#278

Post by cookiecaper »

smarinov wrote: post #260
cookiecaper wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Thanks for letting us know it was dead. I haven't realised it for the part few years of daily usage.

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"?

[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/releases/

[1] https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/07/06/thunderbird-stabi...

[2] http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/30/thunderbird-flies-away-from...

Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

#279

Post by anexprogrammer »

cookiecaper wrote: post #249
anexprogrammer wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

>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.

Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

#280

Post by anexprogrammer »

_jomo wrote: post #255
anexprogrammer wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

> All that crap should be in official plugins so you add pocket only if you want it etc. They are working on making Pocket a (built-in) add-on. Apparently it's harder than it sounds, but there is some progress going on: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215694 Edit: Apparently that bug is fixed and Pocket is a "system addon" in Firefox 46+ https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/3ba655f6bc67

That makes me happier. Thanks for the heads up. Hopefully they did the same for hello.
Post reply on HN