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Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

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Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

#361

Post by minusSeven »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #137
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…

>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.

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.

Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

#363

Post by chflags »

anexprogrammer wrote: post #185
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…

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…

"Nothing at all is user-centric anymore..."

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.

Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

#364

Post by clapinton »

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…

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.

This is not how these things are supposed to be.

Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

#366

Post by minusSeven »

pritambarhate wrote: post #117
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…

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.

holy cow same happens in my windows and I use to think that somehow I forget the password everytime.

Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

#367

Post by cookiecaper »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #150
sangnoir wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

recompiling isn't. packaging for every distribution, edge and not and building autoconf for all of them and ifdef all over the code? not rocket science either, but that stuff does carry an increased cost

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).

Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

#368

Post by afarrell »

buro9 wrote: post #362

I have to do a fair number of remote interviews, and Skype is the way this is supposed to happen. I also use Linux. The net result is that Skype is not how this happens. I usually just offer Google Hangouts as an alternative or phone the person.

Have you tried appear.in ? It doesn't require an account and it allows screensharing also.

Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

#369

Post by cookiecaper »

cm3 wrote: post #171

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.in…

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.

Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

#370

Post by doostee »

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…

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".
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